Lego Education

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

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

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

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.