Agora

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 (?)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Sidewalk! Life?

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

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

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

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

(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

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

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

"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

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?

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

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

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

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

The City is Here for You to Use

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

Beyond Broadcast 2007

"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

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

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

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

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

I just received information about a web site hosted by a group of geographers who are interested in walking in the city. Perhaps readers of this blog might want to share some stories and post some photographs.

A reply to Joan's blog entry about the NPR story coming sooner rather than later.

Tokyo Show Windows

Fruit Crate Label Museum

In a continuing effort to expand the contours of urban communication, here is link to an online musuem of fruit crate labels, which were at one time a cutting-edge technology for branding in a particular social context.

"Back in the days of our grandparents and their parents, people did their produce-shopping at markets that were more like a farmer’s market than today’s grocery stores. The fruit and vegetables would be displayed in their shipping crates somewhere near the railroad tracks, probably under a big shed. Each crate would have a label (up to a foot square) showing the name of the packer, and a colorful design to differentiate the brand."

These labels continue to say a lot about typography, iconography, and long-lived cultural narratives of ethnic identity, consumption, freedom, and gender.

Metapolis - Micro - Urbanism

This event is coming up this Saturday in San Francisco. It explores the relationship between technology and the sidewalk.