John Julius Norwich is an earnest and somewhat stiff-backed editor. So it’s not entirely surprising that he reveals in his introduction that he is “braced for objections” over his selections for “The Great Cities in History,” a collection of essays and images. He anticipates that readers will ask, for instance, why Timbuktu is included and not Toronto, why Meroe (an ancient Nubian city) is included and not Melbourne. It’s a dull question, and Norwich answers it dully, by pointing to the “in history” part of the book’s title. The better answer would have been that there’s not a shred of romance in Toronto and Melbourne.
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.
Consultants find the city doesn’t need more spaces, it needs to change how they are used. New pricing model aims to promote walking, biking or busing, freeing up prime spaces for short-term shoppers.
Over the past two decades, first hundreds and then thousands of San Franciscans have chosen to bicycle as a common means of transportation. This has generated a fair amount of heat and noise, whether during the monthly Critical Mass rides (17 years old and still going strong) or during the episodic controversies over bike lanes, parking, Octavia Boulevard planning and other bike-oriented changes. But what gets less notice is the way the simple choice to bicycle by ever more San Francisco residents is gradually reshaping a sense of public space and a sense of a shared city.
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.
The piano was standing innocently near the Millennium Bridge, minding its own business except for a cheeky come-on — “Play Me, I’m Yours” — printed on its side. For a 24-year-old Australian tourist named Lauren Bradley, it was as alluring as a sign saying “Free Chocolate.”
But perhaps – and here’s the upside – the city, having evolved through brutal modernism and gluggy postmodernism, is approaching its glorious collaborative apotheosis, where we can have the thrill of speed without its harshness and the buzz of being-there without its smugness.
For many communities, street beautification has been viewed as an unnecessary expense. But as cities compete for investment, new residents, and tourists, there can be a substantial return on design dollars. The Value of Urban Design, produced by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) in the UK, quantifies and defines the monetary benefits of thoughtfully-designed urban spaces. CABE argues that good urban design adds value by: producing higher returns on investment; producing local competitive advantages; raising prestige; responding to demand of local businesses; providing benefits to local workers (through productivity gains and the like); and reducing management, maintenance, energy, and security costs.
Urban Farming’s mission is to create an abundance of food for people in need by planting gardens on unused land and space while increasing diversity, educating youth, adults and seniors and providing an environmentally sustainable system to uplift communities.
