Urban Communication

Caught in the Middle: America's Heartland in the Age of Globalism

2008-06-12T10:35:00.003-04:00

Richard Longworth, an international correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, traveled for thousands of miles across the Midwest to understand how the region is grappling with, or failing to grapple with, the challenges of globalization. Globalization has utterly transformed manufacturing and agriculture, undercutting the stability that in some ways defined the Midwest. Longworth argues that regional leadership, increased immigration, investments in higher education, and fostering an ecology of public/private linkages that commercialize research are imperative.

New kinds of communication spaces will be required to refine and implement a Midwestern response to globalization. The Great Lakes Urban Exchange a blog that regularly posts information about urban initiatives and builds connections with 50 or so regional blogs may become an important communication resource. The Heart of Peoria as an online charette, supports citizens efforts to collectively craft a vision for the city.

City Lights from Space

2008-06-11T11:56:00.002-04:00

The photographs of Earth taken by the Apollo astronauts, which framed the Earth as a whole in the lonely context of space, helped foster an environmental ethos--that every place on the planet was made visible for the first time. Technical innovations accomplished by NASA and NOAA create a new level of clarity, allowing us to see for the first time the shape of our urban footprint.

Women in the City

2008-06-11T11:53:00.002-04:00

"Women in the City" is a viral public art exhibition spread throughout the streets of Los Angeles that began in February 2008.

Double One Way Communication

2008-06-11T11:40:00.004-04:00

Given the density of the city and advances in communication technology, it is unsurprising that the environment we live in is being saturated with communication flows. These flows could support all kinds of public uses, allowing groups and individuals to share their voices, perspectives, histories and ideas with others in a particular location. But communication as a public good can't be supported through the market. So instead of a two-way public conversation, are environment becomes filled with stores that monitor our cell phones to track where and when we wander and billboards that look back at us.
One opportunity for making sense of how to better take advantage of advanced communication technologies in an urban setting is the Creating Value: Between Commerce and Commons conference sponsored by The Arc Center of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation.

White Art

2008-06-11T11:36:00.002-04:00

White art, the use of bacon fat back, is one of the less well known urban communication media. This book is titled,

White Art in the Meat Food Business. A Practical Handbook for Butcher, Pork Stores, Restaurants, Hotels and Delicatessens on How to Make Lasting and Transferable White Art Decorations out of Bacon Fat Back for Window Displays, Ornaments on Meat Food Cold Buffets and for Exhibits and Advertising Purposes

via Boing Boing

Massive Investment in Urban Communication

2008-06-11T11:27:00.002-04:00

Toronto is investing $1 billion dollars over the next twenty years in street furniture. Street furniture include a variety of things:

We're talking bus shelters, benches, bicycle posts, garbage bins, information kiosks, newspaper boxes, and a self-cleaning, wheelchair-accessible public toilet system that rings in at $300,000 a pop.

This investment will create a huge number of sites of informal communication, as people pause, ponder, and converse. An investment on this scale will undoubtedly improve the image of the city as well.

A flickr collection provides access to a number of renderings and public documents.

Type City

2008-05-01T14:49:00.002-04:00

The Web has created fascinating new communication spaces, as passionate designers deploy specialized talents to delight and inspire new audiences. Once the domain of a relatively small number of specialists, typography has taken on new life. The connections among the style and personality of type fonts, the cultural vitality of the city, and the representation of urban form are powerfully expressed in this illustration.

Happy May 1

2008-05-01T14:43:00.003-04:00

Washington's Other Monuments

2008-05-01T14:31:00.003-04:00

Washington is both the public face of America and a city without Congressional representation. The formal landscape of public Washington is a space where America can make sense of itself, the materiality of museums and places for public gatherings supporting a dialogue that bridges the past and the future. The blog Washington's Other Monuments documents the memorials that family and community members construct to remember individuals like,

15-year-old Ryan Travon Harris was shot in the head and killed Sunday March 16, 2008, about 2:00 AM in Washington, DC. This shrine, near his grandmother's home in the 3100 block of Apple Rd NE, is near the spot where he was found dead.

Banksy was Here

2008-05-01T14:25:00.002-04:00

The British grafitti artist Bansky encapsulates all of the ironies associated with the postmodern city. He is both famous and anonymous, high culture and low culture, transgressive and conformist, trivial and profound, a sellout and a radical critic. Drawing on a long tradition of vernacular approaches, Banksy does manage a few innovative salvos of urban communication.

Nomads at Last

2008-05-01T13:59:00.002-04:00

The Economist recently wrote an article about the impact of wireless communication and urban nomadism. The term nomad is deeply misleading. Despite the focus on nomadism as a distinctly urban phenomenon, the citation of Manuel Castells, and examples that are all located in advanced urban areas--the term nomad is used to conjure a kind of nostalgic freedom.

Much like the image of the Marlboro Man (the single most valuable brand image ever created) was used to project a lifestyle of ruggedness, independence, freedom, and vigorous, healthy masculinity to a demographic under a great deal of economic (and health) pressure, the image of the nomad is also used to sell a lifestyle.

Urban nomadism requires a highly specialized, capital-intensive infrastructure which is continually evolving. Traditional nomadism requires not only limited, lightweight tools, but more importantly, vast areas of under-populated land not subject to private ownership and control. Urban areas aren't inhabited by nomads, but by individuals with the talents, capital, and ability to negotiate highly privatized spaces.

Urban Abstract

2008-03-15T13:28:00.002-04:00

Skateboard graphics are one urban communication medium this blog has failed to adequately examine. Evan Hecox, previously known for his work for skateboard design form Chocolate, has produced Urban Abstract, a book of ethnic cityscapes reproduced in linoleum block prints.

Ghost Signs

2008-03-15T13:18:00.005-04:00

Ghost Signs is a website developed by Nicole Donohoe, MS candidate in Historic Preservation at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago. The site maps overlays of ads, images, and text in Chicago neighborhoods, documenting the palimpest of the past. Contributions of photographs, sign locations or historical information are welcome: email inquires, information, malfunctioning links or other suggestions to Nicole project@hotmail.com. (Tip of the hat to Sue Novak who pointed me to the site.)

The Endless City

2008-03-15T13:04:00.005-04:00

The Endless City, a new book edited by the London School of Economics' Ricky Burdett and design curator Deyan Sudjic, presents the work of more than 40 specialists who have worked to make sense of the new global urban condition. The book was recently profiled in a Business Week article titled, The City of the Future .

VISUALIZING GREEN: COMMUNICATING ENVIRONMENTAL FRIENDLINESS THROUGH PRODUCT DESIGN AND APPEARANCE - Artek Culturelab

2008-03-10T15:28:00.001-04:00

Finnish industrial designer Pekka Kumpula offers three concepts developed at Artek Culturelab toVisualize Green through the design of product design and appearance.

Bricoleurbanism� Urban Fabric & Form Comparison

2008-03-10T15:24:00.001-04:00

The Bricoleurbanism
blog recently posted a story about urban form that is important to urban communication. Jane Jacobs always emphasized the importance of urban form, for example the use of small blocks which allow for multiple, overlapping paths through the city. This article offers a quick comparison across the urban patterns of Rome, London, Barcelona, etc.

Urban Typography Workshop

2008-03-10T15:13:00.002-04:00

Mediamatic.net - On the Urban Typography workshop

Urban Typography: what does your city say to you and what do you say to your city? This workshop encouraged participants to express themselves through words and text in their urban environments through the use of Mediamatic's Fab Lab.

Shack/Slum Dwellers International

2008-02-28T14:31:00.002-05:00

The "digital divide" has been a topic of concern for more than a decade. But having a voice in decisions that matter in a global, information society goes well beyond simple access to the Internet. Organizational skills needed to gather information, deliberate about complex issues, and mobilize political support have too often been limited to a limited stratum of formally educated elites. Shack/Slum Dwellers International aims to ,

enable those who are affected by poverty to become organised and united in ever-expanding networks, and to play a defining role in the way in which Governments and multi-laterals discharge their obligations to the poor.

Nokia Morph Concept

2008-02-28T14:26:00.002-05:00

Cellphones have an obvious connection to urban communication networks via wireless connections. But increasingly objects are designed so that they are more deeply embedded within many kinds of networks. Featured in a Museum of Modern Art exhibit, the Nokia Morph concept device is connected to its urban environment in the following ways:

Self-Cleaning
Nanotechnology also can be leveraged to create self-cleaning surfaces on mobile devices, ultimately reducing corrosion, wear and improving longevity. Nanostructured surfaces, such as “Nanoflowers” naturally repel water, dirt, and even fingerprints utilizing effects also seen in natural systems.

Advanced Power Sources
Nanotechnology holds out the possibility that the surface of a device will become a natural source of energy via a covering of “Nanograss” structures that harvest solar power. At the same time new high energy density storage materials allow batteries to become smaller and thinner, while also quicker to recharge and able to endure more charging cycles.

Sensing The Environment
Nanosensors would empower users to examine the environment around them in completely new ways, from analyzing air pollution, to gaining insight into bio-chemical traces and processes. New capabilities might be as complex as helping us monitor evolving conditions in the quality of our surroundings, or as simple as knowing if the fruit we are about to enjoy should be washed before we eat it. Our ability to tune into our environment in these ways can help us make key decisions that guide our daily actions and ultimately can enhance our health.

IXDA Interaction 08

2008-02-07T13:47:00.000-05:00

The urban and the virtual are brought together more tightly everyday, creating the social spaces we now live in. Can the interactions among people, devices, organizations, and spaces be designed to support conviviality?

It is fitting that the first IxDA conference is being held in Savannah, where public squares support a distinctive sense of place and SCAD, which connects academic design with the city.

Interaction 08 will be held from February 8-10, 2008 in historic and festive Savannah, Georgia, on the campus of The Savannah College of Art and Design. Join several hundred Interaction Designers from around the world as we address the design of interactive systems of all types: applications (web and desktop), mobile, consumer electronics, digitally enhanced environments, and more. Start your year off with stimulating talk, fun parties, and smart discussions about our growing field.

Conceptions of the Desireable

2008-02-07T13:40:00.000-05:00

130 acres in Graz, Austria are being redeveloped--one of the last chunks of open space left to develop in Europe. Unhappy with top down approaches to planning, this book documents a different process, with a deep emphasis on the communicative nature of cities and the importance of formatting and representing information so that it can support the planning process, a process which began with discussions led by an editorial board of 32 citizens.

On a gray, if beautifully snowy day in Michigan, the spirit and illustrations in this book are a celebration of the human spirit, creativity and dreams. If the city is half as successful as the book, it will be a wonderful city, urbane in the best sense of the word.

Learning from Copenhagen

2008-01-31T12:58:00.000-05:00

Since 1962, the city of Copenhagen has worked to improve the social life of the city. Now, after more than 40 years, the results of their planning process are clear--the city grows more vibrant, engaging and delightful each year.
Architect Jan Gehl, who has worked as a theorist, researcher, planner, designer and activist for decades, recently coauthored the book New City Spaces. The book details the kinds of urban designs that support public engagement, meaning, and stimulating experiences.

These lessons might be productively applied to the design of web sites--design patterns that support a rich set of social activities, points of contact, and range of intimate and intense relationships are the kinds of web sites that attract and retain attention.

Web 2.0 and the City

2008-01-31T11:34:00.001-05:00

The factors and forces that combine information technology and urban form are infinitely complex--representing these connections requires a deep analytical approach and a keen sense of humor. This image is appropriately complex and funny, a picture made up of a thousand words.

This Youtube clip, of 5000 Web apps in 333 seconds, provides a quick overview of the contemporary zeitgeist.

Finally, on yet another riff on the iconic London tube map, this iA trend map shows the relationships among Web infrastructure, commerce, and social networking sites using the pathways of the Tokyo subway.

Did Someone Say Participate?

2008-01-29T14:02:00.000-05:00

Markus Miessen & Shumon Basar have edited a new book aimed at mapping interdisciplinary spatial practices,

What was once seen as the defensive preserve of architects – mapping, making, or manipulating spaces – has become a new “culture of space” produced and shaped by an ever increasing number of disciplines. Did Someone Say Participate? showcases a range of forward-thinking practitioners and theorists who actively trespass – or “participate” – in neighbouring or alien knowledge-spaces. They share an essential interest: the understanding, production and altering of spatial conditions as a pre-requisite of identifying the broader reaches of political reality.

Virtual Istanbul

2008-01-29T13:50:00.000-05:00

Creating a virtual city in Second Life is becoming increasingly popular, but advanced forms of information technology can serve to support urban areas in the real world. As part of TeraGrid, a National Science Foundation-funded research program, researchers at Purdue created an animated model of a future city. This model is useful,

A second, satellite city would provide immediate refuge to inhabitants of the old city in the event of a catastrophic earthquake and soften such an event's effects on the nation's economy.

Dubai Clones Lyon?

2008-01-29T13:41:00.000-05:00

Not content with the largest museums,islands,office towers and malls, Saeed al-Gandhi, a Dubai businessman is planning to replicate Lyon. Naming rights for stadiums have long been one method of transforming symbolic ownership into a revenue stream. In this deal the city of Lyon has signed a £350m agreement allowing Dubai to reproduce an area of about 700 acres, roughly the size of the Latin Quarter of Paris, that will contain squares, restaurants, cafes and museums.

Using Twitter to Help Communities

2008-01-14T14:59:00.000-05:00

Drawing upon his experience in the San Diego fires of 2007, Nate Ritter has authored a blog post about Using Twitter to Help Communities.

Philips Design

2007-12-20T11:58:00.000-05:00

Immersive technologies are reaching a tipping point where buzz words like convergence, ubiquitous computing, and web 2.0 are transforming social practices. How can designers make sense of these changes? A recent Philips Design probe reveals that,

Far from fading out, as some media reports indicate, Philips Design believes that there is serious attention being paid to virtual immersive spaces, like Second Life, as dialogue with virtual world residents uncovers what companies can achieve above and beyond public relations and branding activities

Urban Computing

2007-12-20T11:52:00.000-05:00

Adam Greenfield and Mark Shepard, co-authors of Situated Technologies Pamphlet 1: Urban Computing and Its Discontents, together with Eric Paulos of Intel Research, will consider the opportunities and dilemmas of ubiquitous computing for urban life in this panel discussion launching the series. The Situated Technologies Pamphlet Series, published by the Architectural League of New York and co-edited by Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz and Mark Shepard, explores the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism: How are our experiences of the city and the choices we make in it affected by mobile communications, pervasive media, ambient informatics, and other “situated” technologies? How will the ability to design increasingly responsive environments alter the ways we conceive of space? What do architects need to know about urban computing, and what do technologists need to know about cities? How are these issues themselves situated within larger social, cultural, environmental, and political concerns?

Thanks to Cindy Frewen Wuellner for the reference.

How to See

2007-12-20T11:37:00.000-05:00

The book How to See, written in 1977 by George Nelson,has just been reisssued. One of the most important designers of the last century, George Nelson deployed his visual insights to understand urban form at a deeper level. Grady Clay's The Reading of the American City is another classic work from this era. Together, these volumes teach us how to understand the fluidity and change of the city in its own terms.

2008 Smart21 Communities

2007-12-05T10:22:00.000-05:00

The
Intelligent Community Forum, a nonprofit think tank focused on the broadband economy, recently released its list of Smart21 communities. These communities, ranging from Dublin, Ohio to Hwa Seong Dong Tan, Korea have been chosen for their innovative approaches to deploy broadband technologies to improve their economies and quality of life.

Art and the Politics of Public Housing

2007-12-03T21:05:00.000-05:00

In Art and the Politics of Public Housing, Jacqueline Leavitt makes the calls of Jane Addams and John Dewey to make art a compelling part of everyone's experience relevant today. Drawing on the examples of Pico Gardens, Aliso Village and Aliso Extension (aka Pico Aliso), three adjacent developments in the Boyle Heights community of Los Angeles, she explores the varied ways art can be deployed to provide a community with a way to reflect on the politics of public housing.

Thomas H. Hahn Docu-Images

2007-12-03T10:22:00.000-05:00

Zenfolio | Thomas H. Hahn Docu-Images | China Urban Planning materials presents close to 4,000 photographs,

The galleries on display here belong to the category of documentary photography. The main subject area is China and that country's rather rapid transformation from a rural to an urban-centered society. Taken together, these galleries constitute a visual archive that for the most part is meant to capture and to preserve information (or "evidence of certain developments" perhaps).

Lego Education

2007-11-13T16:34:00.000-05:00

Building Asia Brick By Brick is a playful exercise designed to think about urban form in a rapidly changing context. Different kinds of representations carry different kinds of affordances and overtones. The lego bricks allow a kind of embodied questioning and synthesis of old and new that isn't possible other representations.

New York as a Songline

2007-11-04T17:15:00.000-05:00

Bruce Chatwin's classic book, The Songlines, was among other things, a reflection on a communicative genre that performed the function of map, history, social identity, and personal voice. There are many ways of making sense of the urban form as communicative. Tobias Frere-Jones recently conducted a walking tour of New York focusing on typography. Although only 23 people took part in person, we can get some of the experience on the web from Michael Surtees'post.

Jim Naureckas offers another set of tours that explicitly reference the songline metaphor.

The blog Acejet170 also focuses on typography in a way that often features compelling ways of looking at the urban landscape. These resources mean that for me walks in my neighborhood become a mosaic of professionally and vernacularly produced signs that carry with them messages about the traces of their history that endure today.

Wikicity

2007-11-04T17:08:00.000-05:00

The wikicity project is an effort of Assaf Biderman, Francesco Calabrese, Kirstian Kloeckl, Carlo Ratti, and Andrea Vaccari to create a projectso that a city performs as a real time control system. Rome is the current implementation, although a few additional implementations are planned.

Festival of Maps

2007-11-04T17:00:00.000-05:00

If there are enough events, does the map eventually become the territory? The ongoing Festival of Maps in Chicago offers the work of more than 30 cultural and scientific institutions allowing us to see the urban world from a very broad range of perspectives, Mercator and otherwise.

Traveling Box

2007-10-31T15:23:00.000-04:00

The contrast between the simplicity of the container and the deep transformation of urban form is remarkable. The Traveling Box ,an interdisciplinary conference being held November 8,9, and 10 at UC Santa Barbara, explores a wide range of the social, economic, and cultural impacts of containerization.

Norfolk's Light Rail

2007-10-02T20:25:00.000-04:00

The Hampton Roads Pilot Online map of Norfolk's light rail uses Flash web technology to combine animation, maps, and passenger data, effectively illustrating the new light rail system that is now under development in Virginia. I especially like that people and buildings are included in the context of the technology.

Market, Mercado

2007-10-02T15:37:00.000-04:00

Otavalo Market, Equador is one of many images they powerfully convey the connection among commerce, culture and food in the Flickr pool tagged Market, Mercado.

Architectural Representations of the City in Science Fiction Cinema

2007-09-29T11:23:00.000-04:00

Eric Mahleb's essay, Architectural Representations of the City in Science Fiction Cinema argues that despite 150 years of planning, little progress has been made in constructing cities that support improved living conditions. And today, we can't even do a very good job of imagining utopian cities.

Written on the City

2007-09-27T10:41:00.000-04:00

Written on the City organizes several hundred graffiti images organized by the city they appear in, from Amsterdam to Wolfville.

Mariachi Bands May or May Not Be Allowed on the Tram

2007-09-27T10:36:00.000-04:00

Jul, an American expatriate now living in Switzerland, blogs about the complex cultural meanings encoded into a series of Zurich transportation signs.

Brand Avenue: The Indie City

2007-09-27T10:20:00.000-04:00

Brand Avenue: The Indie City provides a short analysis of the factors--walkability and local ownership--that make Portland a center for music. When the density, diversity, and talent are combined, urban areas express creativity widely. A recent New York Times article, In Portland, a Golden Age of Dining and Drinking argues that,

This is a golden age of dining and drinking in a city that 15 years ago was about as cutting edge as a tomato in January. Every little neighborhood in this city of funky neighborhoods now seems to be exploding with restaurants, food shops and markets, all benefiting from a critical mass of passion, skill and experience, and all constructed according to the gospel of locally grown ingredients.

Mobility is cultural, not just functional

2007-09-21T12:31:00.000-04:00

In a research article of importance to designers, user researchers and others interested in urban communication, UC Irvine professor Paul Dourish and Intel researchers Ken Anderson and Dawn Nafus argue most approaches to urban user research are too narrow:

While these applications clearly meet needs, they fail to take the urban environment on its own terms; they are based on the idea that urban life is inherently problematic, something to be overcome, in comparison to the conventional desktop computing scenario. Further, they fail to acknowledge the lived practice of urban life, and in particular its diversity and the different urban experiences of different groups. In focusing on abstracted rather than concrete behaviors, on individual consumption rather than collective sociality, and on the pairing between discretionary mobility and urban consumption, this approach paints a very partial view of urban living that leaves many people out of the picture.

David Byrne

2007-09-19T12:40:00.001-04:00

David Byrne's creativity intersects with urban communication in a wide variety of ways. He is an avid biker and advocate of public participation in transportation policy making.

His Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information installation in the Conde Nast Building is a provocative reworking of the communicative assumptions designed into Powerpoint.

And finally, in a more familiar guise, David Byrne Radio offers a new three hour mix of music each month, often organized around an unexpected theme--his mix is perhaps one of the most wide-ranging representation of urban culture in all of its global manifestations that I have encountered.

Urban Communication and Typography

2007-09-19T11:11:00.000-04:00

Joe Clark's presentation Inscribed in the living tile: Type in the Toronto subway is a tribute to the extensive history of the special developed Toronto Subway Typeface. His analysis of how attitudes of permanence, anonymity, and distinctiveness are expressed in the font becomes an analysis of the shifting relationship of the Toronto Subway to its fans, critics, and users.

Architecture of Authority

2007-09-12T14:06:00.000-04:00

Richard Ross's recently published Architecture of Authority is an unflinching examination of

architectural spaces that exert power over the individuals within them. From a Montessori preschool to churches, mosques, and diverse civic spaces—a Swedish courtroom, the Iraqi National Assembly hall, the United Nations—the images in Architecture of Authority build to ever harsher manifestations of authority: an interrogation room at Guantánamo, segregation cells at Abu Ghraib, and finally, a capital punishment death chamber.

Learning from Pompeii

2007-09-12T13:56:00.000-04:00

Carroll William Westfall's LEARNING FROM POMPEII provides an interesting contrast in thinking about the relationship between the built environment and patterns of social life. Even given the scant evidence which time has done so much to wear away, it is still possible to examine curb markings to envision the traffic flow of carts and people in important public spaces. Today, given the limitless traces and mappings of urban flows, we ought to be able to make sense of urban life to support design decisions for a salubrious, convivial community.

Motel Americana

2007-09-11T14:20:00.000-04:00

Motel Americana provides a slice of the kind of life that was made obsolete with the coming of the interstate highway system and chain hotels. Organized by state, this web site offers a nostalgic glimpse of spaces of travel. These places were fixed in location, but their existence relied on a network of travelers. The iconography of these sites expressed a distinctive regional culture at the same time they made a claim on the larger American narratives of freedom, progress, and dynamism. May the peeling paint and burnt lightbulbs be a gentle reminder for us of the fleeting moment of significance we inhabit.

jake longstreth

2007-08-29T12:05:00.000-04:00

The images produced by photographer Jake Longstreth are far too bleak to be categorized as nostalgic, yet these images are important, as they illustrate landscapes that frame a great deal of contemporary social life (I hesitate to use the phrase "support social life"). jake longstreth

Amsterdam Bicycles

2007-08-26T12:59:00.000-04:00

Brian Wilson created a thoughtful comparison of the differences between the bike cultures of Amsterdam and San Francisco. His analysis is enhanced by 82 original photographs contained in his post and numerous comments from others that extend and deepen his thinking. His mini-ethnography is a testament to the kind of power that cheap, convenient digital technologies like photography and blogging have for making sense of social experience.

Agora

2007-08-24T16:24:00.000-04:00

Agora is the title of artist Magdalena Abakanowicz's permanent exhibition in Grant Park in Chicago and a fitting title for the 100th post to this urban communication blog. The public reaction to this work is mixed, but the work does provoke interaction and reaction. One measure of this reaction is the 424 images of the exhibit that have been uploaded to Flickr.

GOOD Magazine: A Love Song to Public Transit

2007-08-24T16:08:00.000-04:00

In yet another form of urban communication, Good Magazine asked a singer to write a song to celebrate the pleasures of the Portland transit system. The song is performed on Youtube.

Walk Score

2007-08-07T21:32:00.000-04:00

Urban form can enhance communication and community by creating dense networks of interesting places. How walkable is your neighborhood? Walk Score uses Google maps and a database of community resources to boil the walkability of an address into a single number. The information is also presented in a clean, useful interface.

Cool Globes

2007-08-07T21:28:00.000-04:00

The City of Chicago is using art to expand the public dialogue and imagination surrounding the issue of global warming:

The exhibit features over 100 sculpted globes, each five feet in diameter, displayed along Chicago’s lakefront from The Field Museum north and at Navy Pier. Artists from around the world, including Jim Dine, Yair Engel, Tom Van Sant and Juame Plensa, designed the globes, using a variety of materials to transform their plain white sphere to create awareness and provoke discussion about potential solutions to global warming.

Brutalized in Boston

2007-08-04T12:40:00.000-04:00

Walt Lockley reinforces his passionate analysis of the Boston City Hall building's brutal consequences for public life with a set of appropriately harsh black and white photographs.

Global Cities at the Tate Modern

2007-07-31T12:03:00.000-04:00

The Creative Review blog remarks on density models developed by Richard Burdett and a team of designers and architects at the London School of Economics:

Global Cities addresses the major issues facing today’s cities – size, speed, form, density and diversity. It evolved out of a previous exhibition included in last year’s Architecture Biennale in Venice. The density models first made their appearance there, where styrofoam forms ingeniously represented the populations of 12 of the world’s major urban centres. For the Tate show, only four models were made, representing the populations of Greater London, Cairo, Mexico City and Mumbai, allowing a more sophisticated model to be developed.

Praise and Curse of the City

2007-07-30T10:05:00.000-04:00

In The Uses of Disorder, Richard Sennett argues in favor of anarchic cities. Overly controlled spaces don't allow people to grow into adulthood and are deadly dull. Some Web 2.0 social spaces are open to the kind of participation and conviviality from which challenge, complexity, and maturity can develop. This photograph is one of the 46,456 images contributed by 2,452 members of the Flickr pool titled "The Praise and Curse of the City."
Perhaps the Internet can gain the qualities of social life present in the best kinds of urban areas. With participation on such a generous scale, sites like Flickr offer more than just access to new images; technologies like tagging also allow us new categories of understanding, categories that would never be part of a top-down, planned design.

Media Wall

2007-07-27T16:41:00.000-04:00

Metropolis magazine examines the media wall, part of the IAC Building in New York. Produced by Bruce Mau Design, the media wall is the latest example of the stitching together of the digital and the urban landscape on a grand scale.

The media wall is technologically innovative, and not all of the problems of connected with projecting a 120 foot high definition image have been solved. The project is also innovative in its relationship with the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU to experiment with media forms approriate for the scale of the wall, the audience of thousands of drivers on the West Side Highway, and the short (when traffic flows smoothly) time frames.

The monumentality of this wall is also designed to be appropriate to the scale of IAC, the corporate vision of Barry Diller which includes more than 60 interactive brands from the Homeshopping Network to Ticketmaster and has a worldwide audience of 239 million people.

Scale/Flow

2007-07-23T12:12:00.000-04:00

A video travelogue that accompanies James Fallows article in the Atlantic magazine provides a useful overview of the rapid growth of Shenzhen. The flows of investment, trade and production integrate cities into a global system, a system profoundly reshaping the context for urban communication. American investment centers, port cities, and the industrial heartland are all affected by the scale and flow of the activities in Shenzhen.

Best Supermarkets in the World (?)

2007-07-20T18:03:00.000-04:00

Andreas Gursky's photograph titled "99 cents" illustrates the empty, and repetitive-albeit colorful choices that fill typical shopping spaces in urban America.

The blog KITSUNE NOIR offers a list of more compelling retail spaces in their post on the best supermarkets in the world.

Desktop-Desktop

2007-07-19T20:19:00.000-04:00

The line between the real and the virtual becomes more intertwined everyday. The Australian blog nownow pairs images of physical workspaces with images of computer desktops. Some of these pairings are straightforward connections between neatly arranged icons and tidy surface areas but other relationships are unexpected.
These pairings might be useful to think about the kinds of relations and patterns, whether physical or mediated, that support creativity and innovation. Malcolm Gladwell drew upon the urban insights of Jane Jacobs to analyze communication relationships in offices in his essay, Design for Working.

This Ain't No Disco It's where we work offers dozens more images of some of the most innovative global web design firms.

Chris Jordan

2007-07-19T20:04:00.000-04:00

Many of the phenomena associated with contemporary social life are so abstract and overwhelming as to out pace our ability to understand them. Photographer Chris Jordan recent portfolio addresses the issues of cigarettes, guns, cell phones and other wonders of modern science and technology.

This photograph depicts two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes. These bottles are simply one element in the general effort to redefine public goods as private commodities. Public drinking fountains are free, yet pervasive advertising and the convenience of instant access results in the production and disposal of plastic packaging on an unfathomable scale. At least the city of New York has a marketing plan for city water.

Social History of Helvetica

2007-07-19T19:57:00.000-04:00

Typography is one of the ubiquitous, yet little noticed elements of urban communication. Here is a link to the Chicago Reader review of British filmmaker Gary Hustwit's documentary about the typeface with utopian aspirations...

How Children Lost the Right to Roam

2007-07-09T12:19:00.001-04:00

A recent article in the Daily Mail maps a dramatic reduction in a child's area of movement over four generations. Freedom, autonomy, development are not innate traits. A child, like other organisms, requires an environment conducive to development and growth, which deeply shape the experience of time, place, and connection to the world. It is easy to slip into a false nostalgia about past golden ages, but maps like this might clarify the tradeoffs between the kind of education gained from time spent in the woods and time spent in Second Life.

Burtynsky Documents China

2007-07-09T12:08:00.001-04:00

Jane Jacobs is best known for her celebration of urban life on a small scale, especially the Greenwich Village. But her concerns were always part of a larger framework. She noted that cities pursuing economic growth through exports are vulnerable; a huge commitment to a specialized infrastructure that is profitable at a moment in time cannot easily adapt to changing circumstances. Ed Burtynsky's powerful photographs show the kind of monotonous, specialized social spaces that are required by the kind of export-oriented production in China. These spaces are the subject of Jennifer Baichwale's film Manufactured Landscapes, which is reviewed by Dennis Hartley.

Eventually, Everything Connects

2007-07-09T11:55:00.001-04:00

Charles and Ray Eames dramatized one of the fundamental lessons of ecology in their film powers of 10 in showing phenomena nested in contexts at a greater level of scale. The blog information aesthetics provides a link to the Simpsons' take on Powers of 10.

Anti-sit Archives

2007-07-09T11:38:00.000-04:00

Transfer: The Anti-sit blog documents the almost baroque interventions made to urban spaces. Iron structures reinforce a moral code: private property owners construct uncomfortable iron points to prevent bums from loitering. Individuals whose options are so limited that a sidewalk provides the creature comforts of rest and warmth are barred from even these minimal satisfactions.

The ugliness and meanness of these structures should signify to every passerby that these private interventions are a poor substitute for the fundamental policies needed to address conflicts over public space, poverty, substance abuse and the treatment of mental illness. Iron points hide social problems by moving people to other spaces, but they don't solve them.

Gyros Tour

2007-05-25T15:43:00.000-04:00

This project documents another richly evocative slice of vernacular life in Chicago. The level of detail present on this site reflects both the complexity of urban life and its representation on the Internet.

The World is Urban

2007-05-25T15:40:00.000-04:00

This week, for the first time in human history, more than 50% of the world population is urban.

No Sidewalk! Life?

2007-05-09T11:45:00.000-04:00

This image is a rejection of everything Jane Jacobs stood for when she advocated sidewalk life. A Chicago Tribune article (available although registration is required) covers the debate about sidewalks in suburbs. Here Hubert Frank is adamantly opposed to sidewalks, "Who knows what you'd be encouraging to come through" he wonders. While those following the spirit of Jane Jacobs might frame this question as an affirmation of all of the wonders and possibilities of urban social life, Mr. Frank worries that the carefully purified social space he inhabits will be polluted by a nameless, faceless other. How much paranoia must dominate one's mental life when something as mundane (in the best sense of this word) as a sidewalk is seen as an attraction or pathway for a dangerous other?

Ridgemont Typologies

2007-05-02T11:34:00.000-04:00

If Thomas Struth turned his lens to the mundane spaces of contemporary suburban space, he might create something like the typologies of photographer Mark Luthringer, whose repetitive grid formats dramatize the contradiction between freedom and the profusion of choices whose distinctions are without meaning.

Payphone Project

2007-05-02T10:36:00.000-04:00

One of the clearest transformations of urban space from public to private is given material expression as public pay phones are removed and private cellphone use expands. The Payphone Project website documents this phenomenon in an impressive range of cultural contexts.

Bloggiest Neighborhoods

2007-04-30T12:32:00.000-04:00

outside.in has just released their study of 3,000 neighborhoods and listed the ten bloggiest neighborhods in the United States. The top 10 bloggiest neighborhoods are more economically, ethnically, and racially diverse than a list of the top ten most educated or top ten most affluent neighborhoods. What is the relationship between the culture of a neighborhood and the level of blogging? Does the energy of these neighborhoods create more opportunities say something interesting or does the change and activity in a neighborhood create larger need for a community forum?

Given the emphasis on individualism, it is important to see a study that focuses on a larger level of organization than the individual and a smaller level of organization than the nation as a whole.

Sao Paolo goes advertising-free

2007-04-18T09:38:00.000-04:00

(via Boing Boing)

Back in December, 2006, the mayor of the 11-million-person Brazilian city of Sao Paulo banned all outdoor billboard advertising, citing advertisers' unwillingness to comply with the city's rules on what sort of billboards can be placed where. Now the rule is in effect, and Flickr user Tony de Marco has documented the eerie sight of a city stripped bare of commercial visuals.

Urban Markets

2007-04-18T09:33:00.000-04:00

Over the past few decades, urban America has seen a resurgence in farmer's markets, which help tie a community together through frequent, informal interaction at the same time that some of the relations that support and sustain community become more visible and understood. Open air markets have a very long history and this web site offers a global set of resources.

Mapping French Identity

2007-04-18T09:28:00.000-04:00

The Strangemaps blog offers many unusual ways of representing the world. What is more communicative than food? This image offers a graphic representation of local identity in France.

Space Syntax

2007-04-04T15:31:00.000-04:00

"Space Syntax provides a unique, evidence based approach to the planning and design of buildings and cities. Our focus is the creation of environments which are socially and economically successful."

One recent project constructs routemaps of pedestrian paths in London in order to understand the opportunities for improving London's public realm.

Participatory Urbanism

2007-03-30T13:58:00.000-04:00

The Internet is crawling with social networking projects like Facebook, Myspace, and countless others that are organized around common interests. As Cass Sunstein, Lawrence Lessig and others have pointed out, to the extent that these projects allow individuals to focus on only the things of interest to themsleves, these kinds of social sites may lead to a diminished sense of connection with a broader public.

Eric Paulos (Intel Research Berkeley), Ian Smith (Intel Research Seattle), and RJ Honicky (UC Berkeley) recently announced an initative aimed at reconnecting individuals to the public they inhabit: "In the spirit of Urban Computing, Participatory Urbanism is the open authoring, sharing, and remixing of new or existing urban technologies marked by, requiring, or involving participation, especially affording the opportunity for individual citizen participation, sharing, and voice. Participatory Urbanism builds upon a large body of related projects where citizens act as agents of change. There is a long history of such movements from grassroot neighborhood watch campaigns to political revolutions. It is not a disconnected personal phone application, a domestic networked appliance, a mobile route planning application, an office scheduling tool, or a social networking service."

What Makes a City Smart?

2007-03-27T22:38:00.000-04:00

For Carol Coletta, CEO and president of the nonprofit group CEOS for Cities and host of Smart City Radio, one of the four most important drivers of innovation and competitiveness is the Connective City.

OOF

2007-03-27T21:47:00.000-04:00

Edward Ruscha's painting works on many levels as an exploration of the relationships among representation and life. The painting plays with the impossibility of representing sound in visual terms, the elements that affect communication, the role of commercial art and vernacular culture, and the blurring of sign and image. And some days can be best captured by OOF.

All Grown Up

2007-03-27T21:38:00.000-04:00

The blog Brand Avenue had a recent post that brought together a variety of analysts who ponder the lessons of the gentrification of the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn.

On the Street

2007-03-27T21:27:00.000-04:00

This blog offers a quirky view on street life in Japan.

The City is Here for You to Use

2007-03-27T21:24:00.000-04:00

Proponents and enthusiasts argue that no domain of human behavior will be untouched by this transformation, but relatively little thought has been given to specifically how these changes might unfold at the scale of the city. How will the advent of a truly ubiquitous computing change our urban places - both the way they’re built, and the way we live them? In this new talk, Everyware author Adam Greenfield tries to wrap his head around this dynamic set of conditions, to clarify what’s at stake and to offer some potential frameworks for building humane and livable cities in the age of ambient informatics.

Andres Duany Gave Quite a Talk

2007-03-06T23:23:00.000-05:00

A speech given by Andres Duany in 2002 has motivated business, political, and civic leaders in Atlanta to develop a proposal to spend $1 billion over the next trwenty years to bring life back to Peachtree Street. The proposal would create a street car system, bike lanes and a string of parks to create a world-class corridor similar to Michigan Avenue in Chicago. The funds would come from a special tax district. It is wonderful to see this kind of transformative vision, but the success of this kind of project always depends upon public input and striking the right balance between the interests of developers and residents of the city as a whole.

Wooster Collective

2007-02-27T00:50:00.000-05:00

The Wooster Collective was founded in 2001 and is dedicated to showcasing and celebrating ephemeral art placed on streets in cities around the world.

Audio Architecture

2007-02-21T17:21:00.000-05:00

Much of our aural landscape is carefully engineered by twenty two "audio architects" in Fort Mill, South Carolina. In this New Yorker article, David Owen describes how much Muzak has changed. Instead of bland "elevator music" Muzak now draws on more than 1.5 million songs, analyzes the "topology"--the cultural and temporal associations carried by tunes--to craft hundreds of disitinctive aural soundscapes.

Their efforts help distinguish the brand identity and shopping environment of Old Navy from the Gap. I am fascinated by the degree to which elaborate data collecting, design, and analytic techniques are used to create the environments we inhabit. These environments may be more enjoyable and diverse than older environments, but we have much less of an understanding, let alone the power to reshape, how and why these newer environments are constructed.

New City Life

2007-02-19T14:07:00.000-05:00

Jan Gehl's earlier book, Life Between Buildings is one of the most sensitive explorations of the relationship between the built environment and vibrant social life. His new book, New City Life, has just been published.

B-Zone: Becoming Europe and Beyond

2007-02-19T13:55:00.000-05:00

B-ZONE is a territorial research and collaborative art project on the transformation of the social and political geographies stretching from Southeast Europe (the Balkans) to Turkey and the Caucasus.

This project examines the role of three infrastructures--an oil pipeline, a highway, and a satellite telecommunication system--in the creation of identity.

Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?

2007-02-19T13:44:00.000-05:00

This book, co-authored by Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter, integrates perspectives from a wide variety of disicplines to explore how the audible aspects of physical space contribute to the fabric of human culture.

Global South Mobility Library

2007-02-16T15:06:00.000-05:00

This section of Youtube contains 76 video clips of problematic urban traffic patterns, providing a glimpse of a wide variety of urban spaces.

G-Econ Project at Yale University

2007-02-13T17:58:00.000-05:00

This web site offers a dramatic representation of the concentration of economic activity at a national level.

Beyond Broadcast 2007

2007-02-13T17:39:00.000-05:00

"On February 24th, MIT Comparative Media Studies will host a conference in collaboration with Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. The one-day event will be held at MIT, and is entitled “Beyond Broadcast: From Participatory Culture to Participatory Democracy.” It will bring together industry experts, academic leaders, and political activists for panel discussions and focused working groups.

Attendees will explore the means, the message, and the meaning of the post-midterm, pre-presidential YouTube moment. Broadcast media have long played a powerful role in shaping political culture and mediating citizen engagement in the democratic process, and the conference will examine how participatory culture is putting the tools of media creation and critique in the hands of citizens themselves."

Smart Space

2007-02-13T17:12:00.000-05:00

There is a lot of buzz around the concept of creating a brand or identity for a city. Ideo is a design firm that has developed an innovative set of practices for developing a formal community vision. This activity stands in an uncertain relationship between public relations and urban planning and it seems like a fertile area for urban communication scholars to contribute to. This article discusses the Ideo experience in Kansas City.

Blandlands

2007-02-13T16:58:00.000-05:00

A handful of dramatic spaces gain the bulk of attention from the media, the design community and academic researchers. It is also important to think about the landscape that serves as the foundation for most social interaction and urban communication. This web site is dedicated to the landscape that Frederic Jameson has termed "junkspace."

Shrinking Cities: Art Dealing With Vanishing Populations

2007-02-13T16:52:00.000-05:00

The world of global flows is shaped by clusters of innovation, massive expansion, and migration. Cities across the globe face opportunities and challenges brought on by an aging population, and economic transformation.

Revisiting Dubai

2007-01-17T11:26:00.001-05:00

Experts from the Project for Public Spaces recently visited Dubai to train real estate developers in the art of Placemaking. This article compares the relatively sleepy pace of development in New York with the explosive growth in Dubai.

The rapid pace of change in Dubai has received extensive media coverage recently. For another perspective on the implications that Dubai has for the city of the future, urban theorist Mike Davis examines Dubai in an essay titled, "Does the Road to the Future End at Dubai?"

Nobody walks in LA

2006-12-19T12:55:00.000-05:00

Nobody walks in LA

2006-12-19T12:53:00.000-05:00