David Lindsey Wade | Photographer
http://www.davidlindseywade.com/

super

Portland, Oregon has already used his open-source software to plan its bus routes. San Francisco, whose MUNI bus system is a frequent target of criticism, could be next to get the treatment. Gorton says he's in talks with the city to supply transit routing software for MUNI that will do a much better job of keeping track of where people are going and figuring out how best to get them there. San Francisco "overpaid greatly" for a badly-supported proprietary closed-source system that barely works, according to Gorton, putting the city under the thumb of a private company that provides sub-par support.

Entrepreneur Mark Gorton wants to do for people what he already helped do for files: move them from here to there in the most efficient way possible using open-source tools. Gorton, whose LimeWire file sharing software for the open-source gnutella network was at the forefront of the P2P revolution nearly a decade ago, is taking profits earned as a software mogul and spinning them into projects to make urban transportation safer, faster and more sustainable.

"Gorton, whose LimeWire file sharing software for the open-source gnutella network was at the forefront of the P2P revolution nearly a decade ago, is taking profits earned as a software mogul and spinning them into projects to make urban transportation safer, faster and more sustainable."

While public, that data was locked by private software used by public organizations and suffered from an overall lack of standards. Thus was born GeoServer, an open-source, Java-based software server that lets anyone view and edit geo-spatial data. Road information can now be painstakingly imported once from proprietary systems or entered from scratch, double-checked by other users, and rolled out to anyone who needs the data

The crash of 2008 continues to reverberate loudly nationwide—destroying jobs, bankrupting businesses, and displacing homeowners. But already, it has damaged some places much more severely than others. On the other side of the crisis, America’s economic landscape will look very different than it does today. What fate will the coming years hold for New York, Charlotte, Detroit, Las Vegas? Will the suburbs be ineffably changed? Which cities and regions can come back strong? And which will never come back at all?

"The crash of 2008 continues to reverberate loudly nationwide—destroying jobs, bankrupting businesses, and displacing homeowners. But already, it has damaged some places much more severely than others. On the other side of the crisis, America's economic landscape will look very different than it does today. What fate will the coming years hold for New York, Charlotte, Detroit, Las Vegas? Will the suburbs be ineffably changed? Which cities and regions can come back strong? And which will never come back at all?"

Matt Jones talk at Webstock. Superb!

Fabulous slideshare presentation by Matt Jones about city magic drawing connections between urbanisation and digitalisation.

so cool

It's about technology and the city. Or if you'd like, the city as technology. The car changed the development of the city irreversibly in the 20th century. I'd claim that mobiles will do the same in the 21st.

hackers are building sensors, bots and software into everything around them bottom-up, fast, cheap and out-of-control. They're creating environments that react, adapt and respond to us - and perhaps more importantly - each other: The Demon-Haunted World. Matt's session will be a whistlestop tour of those days of future past and pointers to some practical futures we can start building right now, together.

Matt Jones on "city magic"

"Archigram thought of behaviour as the raw material they were building with". They also used the term "social software" in 1972... motherfuck the fringe is hard to mine for valuables! :0

save

urban camouflage

Hiding in plain sight in ikea

folks who try to hide their identity and humanity within an urban context. fabulous.

for invading spaces for guillermo

This might be the best thing ever.

dan tag ik 'm ook maar hé. URBAN CAMOUFLAGE

Two French photographers immortalize the remains of the motor city on film

Through the ruins of Detroit..

Could this be more depressing? The once-beautiful Detroit, formerly the economic engine of a nation, is a ghost.

Maybe it's all I've been reading about the collapse of the classic Maya lately, but this seriously gives me the creeps.

check the name.. bring the nature back to the man-made world! Go next nature!

[Marked as WRONG LINK by FreshDel.icio.us]

Kacie Kinzer set out to discover how big city folk relate to their surroundings by releasing a number of cute, helpless robots onto the streets of New York with nothing but a sign asking passers-by to assist them in getting to their destination. Over the course of the following months the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, “You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”

heel leuk

Cardboard robots prove that crowdsourcing works and that people are nice.

The Reeves and Nass of the mini-robots. This is such a great result.

In New York City, we are very occupied with getting from one place to another. I wondered: could a human-like object traverse sidewalks and streets along with us, and in so doing, create a narrative about our relationship to space and our willingness to interact with what we find in it? More importantly, how could our actions be seen within a larger context of human connection that emerges from the complexity of the city itself? To answer these questions, I built robots. Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal. Given their extreme vulnerability, the vastness of city space, the dangers posed by traffic, suspicion of terrorism, and the possibility that no one would be interested in helping a lost

WebUrbanist has covered everything from abandoned wonders of the world to the illicit art of exploring deserted places. These thirty-three core articles cover hundreds of abandoned buildings, vehicles, towns and cities from around the world - highly organized, summarized and collected for the very first time. Consider this our must-bookmark essential guide to the world of haunting abandoned places and daring urban exploration. 7 Abandoned Wonders of America (Part Two - Part Three): Most Americans don’t realize just how close their nearest abandonment might be. Some of these remarkable abandoned buildings and places - from prisons and asylums to entire islands - may be closer than you think. 7 Abandoned Wonders of the European Union: While American abandonments are impressive, European ones can be even more so. Some of them have long pasts and beautiful spaces filled with intrigue and many played critical roles during pivotal points of world history. 7 Abandoned Wonders of the Former

At the beginning of the 20th Century, the city of Detroit developed rapidly thanks to the automobile industry. Until the 50's, its population rose to almost 2 million people. Detroit was the 4th most important city in the United States. It was the dazzling symbol of the American Dream City with its monumental skyscrapers and fancy neighborhoods. Increasing of segregation and deindustrialization caused violent riots in 1967. The white middle-class exodus from the city accelerated and the suburbs grew. Firms and factories began to close or move to lower-wage states. Slowly, but inexorably downtown high-rise buildings emptied. Since the 50's, "Motor City" lost more than half of its population. Nowadays, its splendid decaying monuments are, no less than the Pyramids of Egypt, the Coliseum of Rome, or the Acropolis in Athens, remnants of the passing of a great civilization. Many thanks to : Daniel & Silke Seybold, Guillaume Amiot, Frédéric Champion, Lowell Boileau, ...

衝撃　かつてモーターシティとして輝いたデトロイトが　日本も他人ごとじゃないよ（←時流に乗った発言）

"Nowadays, its splendid decaying monuments are, no less than the Pyramids of Egypt, the Coliseum of Rome, or the Acropolis in Athens, remnants of the passing of a great civilization."

photos of Detroit's modern ruins. Breath-taking

Poze cu mizeria din India.

ゴミだらけ。

As one of Olivia Judson’s biggest fans, I feel honored and a bit giddy to be filling in for her. But maybe I should confess up front that, unlike Olivia and the previous guest writers, I’m not a biologist, evolutionary or otherwise. In fact, I’m (gasp!) a mathematician. One of the pleasures of looking at the world through mathematical eyes is that you can see certain patterns that would otherwise be hidden. This week’s column is about one such pattern. It’s a beautiful law of collective organization that links urban studies to zoology. It reveals Manhattan and a mouse to be variations on a single structural theme. The mathematics of cities was launched in 1949 when George Zipf, a linguist working at Harvard, reported a striking regularity in the size distribution of cities. He noticed that if you tabulate the biggest cities in a given country and rank them according to their populations, the largest city is always about twice as big as the second largest, and three times as big as th

One of the pleasures of looking at the world through mathematical eyes is that you can see certain patterns that would otherwise be hidden. This week’s column is about one such pattern. It’s a beautiful law of collective organization that links urban studies to zoology. It reveals Manhattan and a mouse to be variations on a single structural theme. [...] These numerical coincidences seem to be telling us something profound. It appears that Aristotle’s metaphor of a city as a living thing is more than merely poetic. There may be deep laws of collective organization at work here, the same laws for aggregates of people and cells.

Why elephants and cities have the same basic infrastructure

"For instance, if one city is 10 times as populous as another one, does it need 10 times as many gas stations?"

Karina Pallagst, director of the Shrinking Cities in a Global Perspective programme at the University of California, Berkeley, said there was "both a cultural and political taboo" about admitting decline in America.

Dozens of US cities may have entire neighbourhoods bulldozed as part of drastic "shrink to survive" proposals being considered by the Obama administration to tackle economic decline.

"In Detroit, shattered by the woes of the US car industry, there are already plans to split it into a collection of small urban centres separated from each other by countryside. 'The real question is not whether these cities shrink – we're all shrinking – but whether we let it happen in a destructive or sustainable way. Decline is a fact of life in Flint. Resisting it is like resisting gravity.'"

"The government looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature. Local politicians believe the city must contract by as much as 40 per cent, concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area."

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Honorable Mentions

"The city resembles a jungle in principle. There is the shrub layer, consisting of millions of 1-3 story buildings, then there is the canopy made of 4-12 story buildings and the emergent layer, towering high above the rest, represented by skyscrapers. Leaves and branches are mimicked by the millions of air conditioners and antennas on the rooftops. Everything is interconnected through a liana meshwork, consisting of roads, railway tracks, stairs, pedestrian overpasses, elevators and escalators."

Gorgeous photos of Tokyo. The 1st one especially

The Abandoned & Industrial Edges of New York

Next stop: Cholula!

Amazindly, the list misses China!!!

Urban society may seem a modern phenomenon but cities have been around for a lot longer than one might think. Indeed, once nomadic tribes began to settle in one location, they saw that it was good, became fruitful, and multiplied. Decades, centuries and millennia passed while war, climate change and human migration all took their toll. Relatively few ancient cities have managed to survive the test of time. Here are 10 that have not only survived, but continue to thrive.

The oldest thriving cities, travel-porn pics.

555 KUBIK "How it would be, if a house was dreaming" The conception of this project consistently derives from its underlying architecture - the theoretic conception and visual pattern of the Hamburg Kunsthalle. The Basic idea of narration was to dissolve and break through the strict architecture of O. M. Ungers "Galerie der Gegenwart". Resultant permeabilty of the solid facade uncovers different interpretations of conception, geometry and aesthetics expressed through graphics and movement. A situation of reflexivity evolves - describing the constitution and spacious perception of this location by means of the building itself. Production: www.urbanscreen.com Art Direction: Daniel Rossa - www.rossarossa.de 3D Operator: David Starmann Sound Design : Jonas Wiese Realized with www.mxwendler.net mediaserver A extended version of this documentation can be found here: vimeo.com/5677104

Excellent work in architecture+projection

Wow. Astounding.

diseño 3D en las calles. buenisimo

URBANSCREEN INSZENIERT ARCHITEKTUR. Urbanscreen hat eine innovative Form der Fassaden-Projektion entwickelt: Lumentektur - ein Verfahren zur passgenauen Projektion auf Gebäude und Objekte

Grupo de investigación de proyeccioones interactivas, sobre fachadas y ojeos tridimensionales

detroit pics

NYC Grid is a photo blog dedicated to exploring and discovering The City of New York block by block and corner by corner. Updated every weekday, each post covers a new block with a focus on the mundane and ephemeral.

Osaka's robot-run parking lots mixed with the Minneapolis lakefront; a musician's fantasy metropolis

«Osaka's robot-run parking lots mixed with the Minneapolis lakefront; a musician's fantasy metropolis»

excellent

Decay Texture...rusty,old etc etc...cool!

Writing about a place is difficult. You can spend months, years, even a lifetime in a city and still not really know it. More challenging still, everyone experiences a place differently. Two people who’ve grown up in the same place might fundamentally disagree on what the most scenic landmarks are, if the locals are friendly, the best places to eat, and so on.

I’m going to skip right to the heart of what I want to say about this city: if you’ve never lived in a major city before, you’ll probably like San Francisco. However, if you’re coming from another notable city, you may be disappointed. Hopefully, that’s pretty uncontroversial.

sive, and cold. As above, it’s easy to meet people through work or a common

Alex describes why he will leave SF when he can. Me, I'm leaving for these and more complex reasons. He's so in the tech bubble and the world of food and art, he never mentions California's political mess, or the desertification going on. He's the sort of person he is warning us about: "oung white men with high technical proficiency and lots of disposable income."

同じコンセプトで東京バージョンがあったな。

A great photo journal of an empty Los Angeles.

Images of LA city streets and well known locations...eerily devoid of the people who would normally inhabit it. Logue delivers a literal interpretation of his title: a Los Angeles devoid of inhabitants—no freeway traffic jams, cars, crowded sidewalks or, really, any people at all. Instead, the city has been stripped bare to its concrete bones, creating haunting and eerily empty canyons, playgrounds and beaches. The photos were made over a period of four years, and perhaps it won’t come as a surprise that Logue works for L.A.’s biggest industry: the movies.

The Architects' Journal lists its top ten comic book cities.

via ll.d

From Gotham City to Mega City One, the Architects’ Journal presents a selection of the greatest illustrated urban spaces

urban geography

This year the MIT class ring, the Brass Rat, hides a hackers’ diagram of a subterranean campus wide tunnel network. Networks of secret passages and tunnels have been built on a giant scale, from components of the Maginot line to the Viet Cong Cu Chi Network. Others perform a peacetime function, such as the half mile tunnel network H.G. Dyar built under his Washington home, as a hobby, the passageways under Disney’s Magic Kingdom or the unbelievable 5000 year old Lizard People tunnel network under Los Angeles that the L.A. Times published a diagram of during the depression. Here is a collection of our favorite tunnel network diagrams, drawings or models.

interesting subterranean stuff

This year the MIT class ring, the Brass Rat, hides a hackers’ diagram of a subterranean campus wide tunnel network.

My friend Chris would like this. So sweet.

Scattered across the centre of San Francisco are almost seventy semi-secret spaces, privately owned but open to the public. Subject to the fine print of a little-known pact between City and Commerce, these so-called POPOS (Privately Owned Public Open Spaces) allow alluring vistas of San Francisco and access to its intimate interiors. However, they are often poorly indicated – perhaps a deliberate tactic by the private companies who own the spaces to prevent the pesky public from using them. Accessing POPOS sometimes even requires walking past security guards, or through unmarked doors. No wonder many are underfrequented.

Scattered across the centre of San Francisco are almost seventy semi-secret spaces, privately owned but open to the public. Subject to the fine print of a little-known pact between City and Commerce, these so-called POPOS (Privately Owned Public Open Spaces) allow alluring vistas of San Francisco and access to its intimate interiors. However, they are often poorly indicated – perhaps a deliberate tactic by the private companies who own the spaces to prevent the pesky public from using them. Accessing POPOS sometimes even requires walking past security guards, or through unmarked doors. No wonder many are underfrequented. SPUR lists all 68 POPOS in downtown San Francisco and rates them from poor over good to fair and excellent. For a complete overview, download SPUR’s guide (see below). Or take one of the architectural tours leading you through the network of POPOS in San Francisco’s downtown. Below is a brief legend to the map above.

Privately Owned Public Open Spaces

Kind of want to make one of these for PDX.

Scattered across the centre of San Francisco are almost seventy semi-secret spaces, privately owned but open to the public. Subject to the fine print of a little-known pact between City and Commerce, these so-called POPOS (Privately Owned Public Open Spaces) allow alluring vistas of San Francisco and access to its intimate interiors. However, they are often poorly indicated – perhaps a deliberate tactic by the private companies who own the spaces to prevent the pesky public from using them. Accessing POPOS sometimes even requires walking past security guards, or through unmarked doors. No wonder many are underfrequented.

chalk-outlined shadows

Fantastic chalk drawings

were born, that they will hurt and humiliate you as much as they can. Letting a criminal inside you house almost guaranties you that he will rape/beat/ torture and abuse

some notes/thoughts on urban survival

200 yar

This is a pretty good blog about practical survival in a tought country.

*O*

Linda Vista Hospital

abandoned hospital in Boyle Heights

Abandoned building. Vivid setting for a modern adventure game.

Terrorífco! y de noche y poca gente tiene que ser de infarto!! Alé ahí van las fotos de un hospital abandonado. Gracias AG (Arturo Goga).

reference photos for decrepit building

La Parisienne de Photographie offers you an interactive way to explore the photograph collections of the City of Paris on the Paris en Images site: 25000 pictures

Over 25,000 photographs of the city of Paris online. With French and English interface. The pictures shown on the Paris en Images site may be subject to literary and artistic property rights, industrial property rights, performing rights, rights of publicity, moral rights, property rights or any other right belonging to a third party. Their reproduction by Paris en Image users is authorised for private use only, or to illustrate an educational or research project not commercialised in any form (for example, classes, lectures, theses). Paris en Images offers a free, unlimited-access, interactive way to explore a selection of 25,000 pictures from the photography collections of the City of Paris.

You’ve probably passed it a million times in your travels through downtown Manhattan. Anyone who has ever visited J&R Row or hit the Starbucks on the opposite corner for a post-Brooklyn-Bridge-walk bathroom break has probably noticed its twin towers, and perhaps wondered how much its wealthy tenants must pay to live behind its beautiful brick and terra-cotta facade.

5 Beekman Street doesn’t have any tenants. In fact, it’s completely empty, essentially abandoned, and has been for a decade, with much of the interior shuttered since 1940…

ocalyptic drama of Hashima, we can very easily imagine what the lives of the residents of the famous Walled City of Kowloon were like – in fact we can ask them, as their city was torn down in 1993. The reason why the Walled City gets so frequently mentioned as a ruin is, while it was there, it was as if the people who lived in it were living their lives in the guts of some great, monstrous, maze.

Famous Walled City of Kowloon: Living Inside the Maze