January 2012
10 posts
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Visualizing the Costs of Incarceration in the US
“It cost 17 million dollars to imprison 109 People from these 17 blocks in 2003. We call these million dollar blocks. On a financial scale prisons are becoming the predominant governing institution in the neighborhood.”
Laura Kurgan and Sarah Williams in Metropolis, Jan. 2012
From Columbia University’s Spatial Information Design Lab: Million Dollar Blocks
“The...
A Review of several theoretical bases for Smart...
reblogggged from Nicolas Nova, Pasta & Vinegar: Theoretical bases for Smart Cities:
A theory of smart cities” by Colin Harrison and Ian Abbott Donnelly offers an overview of the different theoretical bases for the “Smart Cities” trope. As the author mentions, “the current ad hoc approaches of Smart Cities to the improvement of cities are reminiscent of pre-scientific medicine. They may do...
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Recording Everything: Digital Storage as an... →
hautepop:
“Within the next few years an important threshold will be crossed: For the first time ever, it will become technologically and financially feasible for authoritarian governments to record nearly everything that is said or done within their borders—every phone conversation, electronic message, social media interaction, the movements of nearly every person and vehicle, and video from...
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“The problem of course is that the “power” of big data to help answer challenging...”
– Massive, crucial point, beautifully expressed - and by an undergrad no less (by name of Evan Freedman).
Comment on The Limits of Big Data by Klint Finley on RWW, June 2011
(via hautepop)
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“You know what I’d really like to see interaction design wrestle with? I would...”
– Towards a Newer Urbanism: Talking Cities, Networks, and Publics with Adam Greenfield | UgoTrade
Adam, this is why interaction designers need to work with sociologists! All we sociologists do is examine the self in everyday life and people’s needs/wants.
Adam Greenfield's reflections on Everyware
I love Adam Greenfield’s reflections on his first book Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. Adam wrote Everyware in 2006, and this interview, Towards a Newer Urbanism: Talking Cities, Networks, and Publics with Adam Greenfield, with Tish Shute was conducted in 2009.
“So, first, I think it’s important to cop to all the places in Everyware where I just outright got...
November 2011
1 post
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“What happens in our cities, simply put, matters more than what happens anywhere...”
– From Beyond City Limits
Via Foreign Policy Magazine
(via modernandmaterialthings)
October 2011
1 post
6 tags
Watchmodernandmaterialthings:
“GENTRIFICATION BATTLEFIELD More and more young people and businesses are settling in Amsterdam North. This animation shows a simulated isometric real-time-strategy game where the old and new inhabitants are fighting over possession of the land.”
Via PSFK
September 2011
4 posts
6 tags
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Modern & Im/material things: Crowdsourced Data and... →
(bold text below is my emphasis - tricia)
modernandmaterialthings:
Christina Corbane and her team at the European Commission’s Joint Research Center (JRC) have come up with some interesting findings that prove otherwise. They used the reports mapped on the Ushahidi-Haiti platform to show that this crowdsourced data can help predict the spatial distribution of structural damage in...
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Can Architecture Affect User Behavior? Dan... →
Dear reader, this entire blogpost from Dan Lockton’s research on how architecture influences people’s behavior is a must read. I want to post an excerpt from it - but i’m having a hard time even choosing which part!
The last work I have read that has made me this excited about architecture and social interaction is sociologist, William H. Whyte’s The Social Life of Small...
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How to influence user behaviour through...
How to influence user behaviour: Design with Intent (Design for Persuasion, Brussels) View more presentations from Dan Lockton
August 2011
5 posts
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The tunnel people of Las Vegas: How 1,000 live in... →
modernandmaterialthings:
It seems easy to read this article and feel pity for the article’s subjects: living in underground tunnels is hardly a charmed existence. Conversely, it seems a bit naive to suggest that these people have truly made the choice to live the way they do, or that they should be romanticized for living an unconventional life.
While reading the article, I was reminded of...
“When you build things for people to live and work and play around, people are...”
– What makes a building ugly? The failure to become a place | MNN - Mother Nature Network
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“If you’ll forgive a momentary lapse into jargon, ultimately our project at...”
– Pachube :: blog: YOU are the “Smart City”
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July 2011
6 posts
9 tags
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“(West considers urban theory to be a field without principles, comparing it to...”
– A Physicist Turns the City Into an Equation - NYTimes.com
Jonah Lehrer says that West compares urban theory to pre-Kepler period in astronomical sciences. I love that West totally disses urban theory. - tricia
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WatchFascinating talk from Geoffrey West - I read the article in NYT a few months ago but I’m a visual learner so I actually feel like I get this talk!
every week 1 million people are being added to cities until 2050
“Cities are the problems and cities are the solution”
quantitative metabolic rate to stay alive for all species lies at the same sub-linear slope = 3/4 <...
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Modern & Im/material things: Beyond Facebook:... →
modernandmaterialthings:
“Everyone was duly blown away by this amazing map of Facebook connections around the world, created by Facebook’s superstar intern Paul Butler…Gaetz simply took the lines of Butler’s map, colored them black, and overlaid them against another map, showing all of the areas in the…
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June 2011
2 posts
6 tags
Physicist, Geoffrey West, wants to find a way to...
One of my favorite urban thinkers, Geoffrey West, is trying to now find a way to model the effects of city growth on society and environment.
I have loved his previous work that examined the metabolic rate of cities where he compared cities to elephants. The main take-away from this research for me was that cities are more sustainable and scalable than smaller scale human settlements precisely...
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Mapping Incarceration: Using GIS to visualize...
I am just learning of Eric Cadora’s amazing project in a Village Voice article from 2004: Million-Dollar Blocks: The neighborhood costs of America’s prison boom.
This is a story about creative approaches to social policy and a story about an individual’s dedication to justice. Eric Cadora began using GIS software to visualize the amount of public funds that were being spent...
May 2011
2 posts
6 tags
Old Urbanist: A History of Street Standards →
kenyatta:
One of the interesting things to learn is that the first regulations for very wide streets long predated the automobile, and were in fact a reaction of debatable justifiability to conditions in the mid-19th century English industrial city rather than the spatial needs of the car (those regulations in turn drawing inspiration from the Baroque city planning of the previous two...
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The overlap of social media and architecture in...
Here’s a great article from Metropolis Magazine (Here but Not Here, by Andrew Blum) that addresses the yet to be discovered overlap in architecture and social media. This overlap is precisely what my research in China is about - how the use of cellphones and computers changes people’s interaction with physical, urban space. This is all part of a process I call Digital Urbanism which...
April 2011
2 posts
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German politician, Malte Spitz's interactive life...
Most people’s understanding of what can actually be done with the data provided by our mobile phones is theoretical; there were few real-world examples. That is why Malte Spitz from the German Green party decided to publish his own data collected from August 2009 to February 2010. However, to even access the information, he had to file a suit against telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom.
The...
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Benjamin Bratton's Interview in The Guardian on...
I really enjoyed reading Benjamin Bratton’s latest interview in The Guardian. Here are some experts of my favorite parts. You can read the rest of the interview here.
Perhaps the main points of conflict for the near future for cities are between formal and informal urbanism on the one hand, and “open” vs. private urbanism on the other. Informal open spaces in many of the...
March 2011
2 posts
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WatchKevin Slavin’s super brilliant talk on how algorithms are changing the urban form
It is so rare to see an intellectually brilliant talk coupled with breathless storytelling - but when it happens it is truly beautiful. Kevin’s beautiful talk at Lift 2011, Those Algorithms that Govern our Lives, walks you through how algorithms that enable financial services exploit every nanosecond are...
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February 2011
3 posts
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Datapolis: International Biennale on novel...
Enter5 | international art | sci | tech | biennale prague
DATAPOLIS is a call for theory and practice based proposals addressing emerging interactions of media technologies, novel visualization practices and urban realities.
Let us discover the moods and the rhythms of our cities, bodies and planet and innovatively mash both visible and invisible data that re-present individual and collective...
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Panel as SXSW 2011: Time Traveling: Interfaces for...
[this looks like an interesting panel at sxsw 2011. plus my friend ryan shaw is one of the speakers!]
Displaying geography alone is easy: interactive maps are more and more a part of our everyday lives. Displaying time alone is easy: we are all familiar with charts and animations that show the passage of time. It is increasingly common to display time and space together in a single visual...
January 2011
3 posts
“While architects speak of designing space that satisfies human needs, it is...”
– Architect Lebbeus Woods on anarchitecture and freespaces in The Architecture of Information: Open Source Software and Tactica; Poststructuralist Anarchism by Michael Truscello
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If You Build It, They Will Come: Architecture and...
Excerpt fromMichael Truscello’s The Architecture of Information: Open Source Software and Tactical Poststructuralist Anarchism
4. Architect Lebbeus Woods, whose “anarchitecture” attempts to create “freespaces” through indeterminate structures, identifies the relationship between architecture and ideology: “While architects speak of designing space that...
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a LOVELY transhumanist take on cities for cyborgs...
I believe that we’ve always been cyborgs just as much as we’ve always been humans. Yet, computers are often seen as the sina qua non of a cyborg reality. But if we expand the definition of cyborgs beyond a trans-human being with electronic parts, then we can see how we’ve always out-sourced information processing to organic and inorganic things. In this way, the long lineage of...
December 2010
2 posts
17 tags
Megacities on the move: a action-oriented resource...
Megacities on the move is an amazing resource for anyone working on urban issues (download pdf here). The report is based on interviews with 40+ experts on sustainable mobility. It is an action-oriented workshop guideline with an entire section on how you can host your own workshop on these issues. And two case study on Istanbul and Mumbai are provided along with 4 pretty animations and light...
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Life for the next generation: Hi-tech vision of...
From The Scotsman, by GARETH ROSE
Stackable electric cars that people can hire in big cities and “telepresence” screens that allow people to talk to someone in a different continent as if they are in the same room are just a generation away, according to a vision of the future set out today.Forum for the Future has released a new report on how the planet might look in 2040, as mankind...
November 2010
4 posts
10 tags
Two funded PhDs in design, social media and the...
The Institute of Design (IDE) has just announced two fully funded PhD positions in design, social media and the city. This looks super cool! So look into it if you’re interested! (thanks kevin for the tip)
More info below:
Goals & sub goals: YOUrban aims to explore how social media may be used in an urban context to challenge the notion that our environment is given, or imposed on...
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Google Maps in another battle between...
[thanks ben hammersley for the tip!]
from Joshua Keating - Nicaragua cites Google Earth to justify ‘invading’ Costa Rica
Costa Rica and Nicaragua are in the midst of a highly tense standoff after Nicaraguan troops crossed into a contested border region and set up camp, taking down a Costa Rican flag. Costa Rica, which has no standing military, has called for an emergency meeting...
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“digitization and related digital access to land title records in Bangalore had...”
– [example of neo-informationalism - open data for wealth creation, thanks benjamin bratton for pointing this out to me! - tricia]
Excerpt from Michael Gurnstein’s Open Data: Empowering the Empowered or Effective Data Use for Everyone?
Efforts to extend access to “data” will perhaps inevitably...
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October 2010
10 posts
5 tags
“The physical characteristics of walls are not decisive as to their meaning....”
– [I like that the WALL IS seen as a wall of possibilities - that a wall isn’t just a negative block. The question first is what does this wall do?
I am thinking of this quote in the context of digital urbanism - virutal walls from firewalls, closed routers, internet cafes, surveillance,...
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Thoughts on William H Whyte: Julian Bleeker's...
this is post reblogged from Julian Bleeker’s Near Future Laboratory. This is an AWESOME experiment that Julian did - he recreated William H. Whyte’s Social Life of Small spaces with a 24 foot pole.
Near Future Laboratory » Blog Archive » William H. Whyte Revisited: An Experiment With An Apparatus for Capturing Other Points of View
Times Square and its intriguing public...
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Theorizing the Digital City: Abstracts from 5...
[I wish that i could’ve attended this session! In the meantime I need to look up each author’s work! - tricia]
AAG - 2010 Annual Meeting, Washington, DC Session Description: From locative media to cloud computing, smartphones to embedded 2d bar codes, cities are emerging as digital platforms. Situated within and comprised of the cyber-infrastructure that makes digital environments...