Last week, a group called the Urban Repair Squad painted sound-effect words—”Thunk!” “Oof” and the like—along Toronto’s Harbord Street where potholes and other perils threaten cyclists. They’re calling the project “Pothole Onomatopoeia.”
Popularity: 20% [?]
Walking through parts of New York can feel like walking through a tunnel. The city’s ubiquitous sidewalk sheds — typically blue scaffolding holding up green plywood to protect pedestrians from construction overhead — corral people into cramped, dark spaces wherever development or building repairs are underway. There are about 6,000 of these sheds throughout the city.
Popularity: 42% [?]
New Yorkers maintain that Los Angeles is a city with no center. But Angelenos argue that the city of freeways has its core in the Stack, a tower of overpasses — the first four-level connector interchange, according to the California Transportation Department — where the Pasadena, Harbor, Hollywood and Santa Ana freeways intersect.
Popularity: 55% [?]
Whether it’s bike polo, urban golf or scaling public buildings, interesting new urban sports are leaving a distinctive mark on German cityscapes. The metropolitan antics add a twist to traditional sports — and may be cropping up on stretch of tarmac near you soon.
Popularity: 46% [?]
On Friday morning, in what might be seen as evidence that tough economic times can be good for art, a new 37,000-square-foot outdoor exhibition and performance space will open in Lower Manhattan.
Popularity: 31% [?]
Maybe this can also ease the American housing crisis: Two brothers in Brazil are literally living on the outside of a building in Rio’s Old Center. Since May, twenty-seven-year-old Tiago Primo and his twenty-year-old brother Gabriel, have been sleeping, working and eating on the side of a building 33 feet up in the air for twelve hours every day. They plan to continue this display until August. Um yes, it’s art.
Popularity: 52% [?]
Chirpingbirds, rustling leaves, a burbling brook: not the first sounds that come to mind about the New York City subway.
But starting next year, the city’s subterranean soundtrack — a familiar overture of clanks, screeches, groans and beeps — is poised to add a few noises of a more verdant variety.
Popularity: 33% [?]
Unlike all his predecessors since Kennedy, Obama is an engaged city dweller — just like the majority of Americans.
Popularity: 19% [?]
An interesting Portugese campaign (via Osocio and social design notes) used crosswalk stripes made out of the names of pedestrians killed in car accidents to at once remember those lost as well as call attention to pedestrian safety. The curb message says,”One quarter of the victims of auto accidents are pedestrians.”
Popularity: 21% [?]
AT night, it’s bright enough to stop traffic. One minute cars are buzzing along Wilshire Boulevard between Fairfax and La Brea. The next they slow to a crawl, even though the stoplight is green. The attraction? An art installation consisting of some 200 salvaged cast-iron lampposts from the 1920s and ’30s arranged in formation at the new entrance of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Come dusk, the lamps turn on and create a sort of flying carpet of light.
Popularity: 16% [?]