Archive for Social Networks
September 13, 2011 · Filed under Architecture, Crime, Pedestrians, Public Life, Public Space, Social Networks
In designing and constructing environments in which people live and work, architects and planners are necessarily involved in influencing human behaviour. While Sommer (1969, p.3) asserted that the architect “in his training and practice, learns to look at buildings without people in them,” it is clear that from, for example, Howard’s Garden Cities of To-morrow (1902), through Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine and La Ville radieuse, to the Smithsons’ ‘Streets in the sky’, there has been a long-standing thread of recognition that the way people live their lives is directly linked to the designed environments in which they live.
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Popularity: 1% [?]
December 21, 2010 · Filed under Density, Diversity, Economics, Megaregions, Social Networks
“If you ask people why they move to the city, they always give the same reasons,” West says. “They’ve come to get a job or follow their friends or to be at the center of a scene. That’s why we pay the high rent. Cities are all about the people, not the infrastructure.”
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Popularity: 1% [?]
May 14, 2010 · Filed under Children, Diversity, Families, Grassroots, Happiness, Housing, Resilience, Social Networks
Imagine a community where you like your neighbours. You share meals and your children grow up together.
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Popularity: 43% [?]
May 4, 2010 · Filed under Information Design, Planning, Social Networks, Urban Structure, Visualization
We hear the word innovation a lot these days. But the word’s ubiquity in contemporary discourse speaks to the undeniable surge in new ideas of how to make complex systems, like cities, work better. Many of these ideas rely on recent technological advances that enable the capture of huge amounts of data and the interconnection of large networks of individuals. Regional Plan Association (RPA) has been in the business of coming up with new ideas to make the New York metropolitan region work better since 1922. A few months before the Wall Street Crash of 1929, RPA released a plan for the region that helped to pave the way for the systems that supported New York’s recovery from the Great Depression and subsequent growth. Two other long-range plans, in 1968 and 1996 have argued persuasively for coordinated planning across municipal and state boundaries that integrates community design, open space, transportation, housing, and economic and workforce development.
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Popularity: 44% [?]
April 27, 2010 · Filed under Authenticity, Creative Cities, Public Life, Retail, Social Justice, Social Networks
All places, even countries – as brilliantly satirized in this image – are distinctive clusters of people, communities, organizations, institutions, beliefs, tastes, personal and public mania.
Go out on to the street, slip on a pair of psychological x-ray spex, forget the physical ways in which we organize ourselves and start to see the city as a zoo that encloses a multitude of social, economic and personal struggles.
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Popularity: 25% [?]
April 6, 2010 · Filed under Active Transportation, Authenticity, Beauty, Creative Cities, Cycling, Diversity, Great Streets, Happiness, Nature, Public Life, Social Justice, Social Networks, Uncategorized, Urban Design
Happiness itself is a commons to which everyone should have equal access.
That’s the view of Enrique Peñalosa, who is not a starry-eyed idealist given to abstract theorizing. He’s actually a politician, who served as mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, for three years, and now travels the world spreading a message about how to improve quality-of-life for everyone living in today’s cities.
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Popularity: 70% [?]
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: 32% [?]
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: 35% [?]
February 4, 2010 · Filed under Advertising, Artificial Landscapes, Authenticity, Information Design, Media, Public Space, Social Networks
Digital screens now line the walls of nearly every airport terminal, restaurant, convenience store, bar and waiting room in America. They have popped up in gas stations, taxis, schools and even on public buses. They wrap the exterior of L.A. Live and other major commercial complexes. And increasingly they rest in our palms, in the form of the iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smart phones that many of us rely on, like Dante following Virgil, as we walk or ride through the city.
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Popularity: 29% [?]
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% [?]
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