35 Examples Of Beautiful City Photography | Inspiration | Smashing Magazine
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/02/01/35-examples-of-beautiful-city-photography/
How the Crash Will Reshape America - The Atlantic (March 2009)
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200903/meltdown-geography

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?"

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Dubai threatens to become an instant ruin, an emblematic hybrid of the worst of both the West and the Middle-East and a dangerous totem for those who would mistakenly interpret this as the de facto product of a secular driven culture.

And so it goes, quite predictably too.... "As people scramble for the exits in Dubai, there is no ‘key mail’, like in America, where people can often mail back their house keys and walk away from a mortgage without the immediate threat of jail. People are literally fleeing this place, to date leaving 3000 cars stranded at the airport with keys still in the ignition. And the reason for this is that if you default on your Dubai mortgage, you can end up in a debtors prison. Perhaps Dubai will at least create a new Dickens?"

"people who have hundreds of millions or a billion in the bank are not going to change their lifestyles"

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

Real weather with real material.

cute

Let me know if you have no interest in the things I randomly send you - this made me think of your union rant plus your blog about shoes on wires :)

Prior to DIYcity, Geraci co-founded the hyperlocal news network Outside.in.

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?"

find out what the top topics on twitter in san diego are

Twitter

No Ottawa, too bad.

Happn.in shows you what people are twittering about in your city.

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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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.

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»

The small towns in America

Every now and then, you stumble upon a town that's gotten everything right—great coffee, food with character, shop owners with purpose. These 10 spots have it all, in perfectly small doses.

Examples of small towns with character....what Kenmore wants to be

e that a lot of people go through that starts when people go a little crazy as a result of all that, gradually realize that it's all a little illusory and that what they have instead of friends is a lot of the same awkward party conversations over and over, start working a little too hard to recapture the former glory, and end up burnt out and jaded. I'm not saying all of this can't be avoided, but to do so, I think you have to come in with more skepticism and awareness than the typical wide-eyed SF hipster-techie transplant does. Perhaps if I had come to SF with Caroline's wariness and your advice, I would have had a better time.

I don't think the world should look like San Francisco, nor do I think that it should be home for everyone. But if you're going to come here, even if it's only for a year, you should make the most of it. And to do that (and this really goes for anywhere) you need to embrace what's unique about it.

http://emptyage.honan.net/mth/2009/07/are-you-going-to-san-francisco.html

How to make the most of living in SF. Wouldn't that be very lovely? Anyway, I think these could probably be generalised as to how to enjoy any city. (via Kottke)

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

In this beguiling Pacific Northwest city of artisanal cafes, offbeat museums, funky neighborhoods and food carts from every corner of the world, the good life comes cheap.

The Big Picture - News Stories in Photographs from the Boston Globe

great night photos of cities

CNNMoney.com

Columbia/EC is #8 overall, but Omaha #8 on home affordability, other NE towns (Columbus) on short commute

We've seen maps of photographic activity around the world, and maps of traffic activity in a city, which reveal how heavily roads are used. And now, photographer Eric Fischer has combined both ideas, creating maps of 50 different cities around the world, using only the geotags of photos uploaded to Flickr and Picasa. What emerges are basically maps of human interest--that is, all the places fascinating enough that someone decided to take a picture.

Some people interpreted the Geotaggers' World Atlas maps to be maps of tourism. This set is an attempt to figure out if that is really true. Some cities (for example Las Vegas and Venice) do seem to be photographed almost entirely by tourists. Others seem to have many pictures taken in piaces that tourists don't visit.

Overviews of places tourists visit versus places locals visit.

Blue points on the map are pictures taken by locals (people who have taken pictures in this city dated over a range of a month or more). Red points are pictures taken by tourists (people who seem to be a local of a different city and who took pictures in this city for less than a month).