Archive for Grassroots
February 12, 2010 · Filed under Beauty, Grassroots, Highways, Landscape, Nature, Parks, Public Space, Urban Actions
A few weeks ago in San Francisco, a number of urban farmers opened a gate in a chain-link fence at Laguna Street, between Oak and Fell Streets, and entered an overgrown lot that has been unused for nearly two decades. The farmers brought with them steaming piles of mulch, which they cast over the edge of the ramps formerly used by cars to enter and exit the elevated Central Freeway spur above Octavia Street, arranging the soil in rows for planting vegetables and filler crops.
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Popularity: 30% [?]
February 12, 2010 · Filed under Creative Cities, Diversity, Grassroots, Social Networks, Urban Actions
Over the past couple of years, coworking has been gaining momentum and attention. It is bringing a new and more flexible way of working to cities by helping people to take advantage of the benefits of interaction and collaboration. Breakout! is taking coworking a step further - pushing people to think entirely outside of the office “box”, and using all of the spaces a city has to offer to do work. By using the city as the office, Breakout! brings work back to the streets – to the places where work, play and leisure have happened for centuries.
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Popularity: 27% [?]
February 11, 2010 · Filed under Creative Cities, Diversity, Grassroots, Happiness, Public Life, Social Networks, Urban Actions
Is it just me or, is the modern urban neighborhood getting remarkably old-fashioned? In the Los Feliz (locals pronounce this los-FEE-liz) community of Los Angeles where I live, it feels like everything that was old is new (and smart) again. Things my grandparents in Kentucky have always done—checking in on neighbors, sharing a new crop of tomatoes—seem not so much folksy as generally just a good way to live, even if you are in the big city.
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Popularity: 27% [?]
February 4, 2010 · Filed under Creative Cities, Diversity, Gentrification, Grassroots, Homelessness, Housing, Public Space, Real Estate, Shelter, Social Justice
Hamburg has been trying to woo the much-coveted “creative class” for years in a bid to secure its future. Now the city has become the front line in a bitter conflict over gentrification, with artists squatting buildings in protest against investment plans and members of the far-left scene attacking private property — and even police.
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Popularity: 13% [?]
January 12, 2010 · Filed under Cities from Scratch, Grassroots, Homelessness, Housing, Nature, Social Justice
A crusading minister has built a forested Utopia for the itinerant and destitute. But is a social experiment what they’re looking for, or just a place to live?
The camp looks something like the scene of an extended hunting trip, but it is in fact a homeless encampment—possibly the largest in the tri-state area, not that any governmental body has bothered to keep track. Some call it Cedar Bridge, after the nearest paved road.
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Popularity: 17% [?]
November 17, 2009 · Filed under Emergence, Grassroots, Master Planning, Place making
The importance of small ideas to urban revitalization isn’t widely appreciated. Particularly in the most recent real-estate cycle, many planners, design professionals, and developers produced grand schemes instead. But profound change is more likely to result from a deeply considered idea that alters an essential component of an urban environment than from an elaborate master plan that requires abundant resources and considerable political capital. While some large-scale plans, like Rockefeller Center, are successful, most become impersonal, overbearing failures—or, even more often, are stillborn, the victims of the long process of assemblage, environmental remediation, community participation, zoning adoption, and the securing of financing.
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Popularity: 31% [?]
October 22, 2009 · Filed under Grassroots, Information Design, Landscape, Social Networks, Urban Design, Visualization
Experimental Geography explores the distinctions between geographical study and artistic experience of the earth, as well as the juncture where the two realms collide (and possibly make a new field altogether). This lavishly illustrated book features more than a dozen maps; artwork by Francis Alÿs, Alex Villar, and Yin Xiuzhen; and recent projects by The Center for Land Use Interpretation, the Raqs Media Collective, and the Center for Urban Pedagogy.
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Popularity: 34% [?]
October 20, 2009 · Filed under Grassroots, Information Design, Planning, Public Life, Social Justice, Visualization
Brian House and Jesse Shapins were two of the co-creators of Yellow Arrow, an early locative media arts project and social software platform. In summer 2008, they co-taught the studio/seminar “Critical Urban Media Arts” at Columbia. Here, they discuss the conceptual background of the course and the pedagogical methods they developed, including Periplurban, a new platform for urban media research.
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Popularity: 28% [?]
October 20, 2009 · Filed under Grassroots, Information Design, Planning, Public Space, Social Justice
LimeWire founder Mark Gorton has recently announced to launch an application for open source urbanism, inspired by the peer-to-peer principle. Gorton’s goal is to stimulate “crowdsourced development, freely-accessible data libraries, and web forums, as well as actual open source software with which city planners can map transportation designs to people’s needs”, aiming to open up the city planning process to a wider audience and shine light on decision-making processes.
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Popularity: 24% [?]
October 19, 2009 · Filed under Creative Cities, Grassroots, Information Design, Planning, Social Networks
Open Cities: New Media’s Role in Shaping Urban Policy was a two-day conference, produced by Next American City and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, that united new media and urban policy’s top thinkers and practitioners. Through a series of panel discussions, presentations and networking opportunities, this conference will discuss new media’s strategies for dealing with a variety of challenges — such as how to build an engaged urban citizenry, best utilize municipal data and develop cost-saving technologies or networks to improve cities. For more about the conference, click here.
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Popularity: 19% [?]
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