Category: urban

• Research / East Baltimore police narratives in ixd, lit, reviews, urban · May 4, 17:53

  Last week I picked up a book called

• Urban farming / My robot bees are pregnant in food, urban · Apr 26, 19:01

  [Danger: I could only get the video to play in IE. Not sure if it's my particular array of Firefox add-ons that are blocking its mojo, or what.]
  So every few weeks I sift through the mostly asinine archives of SFist, and today, against all odds, I found something interesting: A llittle blurb about urban beekeeping [...]

• UX / Cellphones & world poverty in ixd, mobile, urban · Apr 15, 01:30

  Jan Chipchase seems to be the “it” guy1 of user experience these days. He lives in Tokyo, works at Nokia, and plays this kind of swashbuckling, Indiana-Jones-ish role in researching mobile technologies in developing cultures. He keeps an intriguing blog called Future Perfect, where he documents UX-related nuggets from the shantytowns of Lagos, the markets [...]

• New Yorks, new museums, new coffees in architecture, new york, travel, urban · Mar 5, 01:33

  This is an incredible mosaic in the bathroom of the New Museum of Contemporary art in New York. It is also EASILY the most impressive thing in the whole museum.

  New York was filled with good times, as usual, but a couple of the things that totally blew my mind (and that are link-friendly) were Jamaican [...]

• Philly / A few minutes at Space 1026 in inside art, urban, visual · Nov 4, 20:00

  I was in Philadelphia last Thursday evening, and I discovered that I was staying near Space 1026, a studio/gallery near downtown. Some artists from 1026 had some cool work in a show at Yerba Buena a while ago, I walked over and spent a few minutes walking around as the residents were setting up for [...]

• Washington DC / Fortress of democracy in architecture, urban · Aug 21, 20:43

  If the government buildings are any indication, Washington DC is a city bracing for something. Makeshift barriers surround the Capitol; men with automatic weapons stand watch over random governmental doorways and intersections. Sure, this is no different than other “significant” places in the Western world – London and Frankfurt have their share of fortresses and [...]

• San Francisco / Maps and earthquake shacks in architecture, san francisco, the ancient past, urban · May 29, 21:59

  This weekend I got an incredible book about San Francisco called San Francisco in Maps & Views. I usually avoid glossy coffee-table historical books because they’re so often filled with disappointments — bad color, bad printing, messy layout, uninspired writing, PLUS they’re really expensive. But THIS ONE. This one is different. The maps are very [...]

• NYC subway maps / The great debate of 2007 in ixd, urban, visual · Apr 27, 18:56

  A graphic designer named Eddie Jabbour has proposed an alternative design for NYC subway maps. The New York Times wrote about it last week, and since then blogs have been blowing up over it. 37 signals evaluated it, and applauds the effort to increase usability at the expense of geographic accuracy: “Subway map readers want [...]

• Architecture / Teddy Cruz’s urban acupuncture in architecture, ecology, urban · Apr 17, 17:56

  Last night, I saw architect Teddy Cruz deliver a fast-paced, idea-rich presentation at the San Francisco Art Institute. In a little over an hour, he tore through a slide show covering his recent work on the social, cultural, political, and economic forces at work in communities along the US-Mexico border. The slide show itself was [...]

• NYT / JFK to Manhattan on foot in new york, urban · Dec 6, 21:33

  “People don’t know where they are anymore, “ [the writer Will Self] said, adding: “In the post-industrial age, [walking] is the only form of real exploration left. Anyone can go and see the Ituri pygmy, but how many people have walked all the way from the airport to the city?”
  This is from A Literary Visitor [...]

• Architecture / Daniel Libeskind’s sauna in architecture, ixd, new york, urban, visual · Aug 26, 02:25

  A few months ago, the NYT Sunday magazine ran a profile of architect Daniel Libeskind and his Tribeca loft. (Incidentally, check out that link to his website; there’s some pretty hot flouting of web conventions. For example, when you mouse over a link, almost everything on the screen disappears, except a few stray words and [...]

• Alone in Houston in flickr, urban, visual · May 19, 20:44

  I put some new photos on my Flickr page recently. This one is from a recent trip to Houston. I took it while driving around (I believe it’s called) The Beltway. The photo makes Houston seem empty, which, as I recall, is like the opposite of what it is. Especially the freeways. I don’t [...]

• Liz Christy garden / cradle of urban gardening in ecology, new york, urban · Apr 25, 14:07

  The roots of (modern) urban gardening can be traced to the Liz Christy Garden on New York’s Lower East Side. (Some good 70’s photos of urban hippies getting their hands dirty). When I visited, the cherry blossoms were going off.