“Symphonies are playing Beethoven’s 6th while walking down city sidewalks, opera singers are collaborating with hip hop musicians and entire abandoned buildings are being turned into works of art, challenging the way we view the arts and the way that art fits into our everyday world.”
Meg Peterson on the changing approach to art.
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Great video: IBM develop a young girl’s idea to build a flashing crosswalk to remind drivers that pedestrians are coming.
Is it graffiti or is it street art? This handy tool can help you work it out!
For a bit more of an in-depth analysis, check out our latest post.
“Poor residents have built makeshift homes from whatever materials they can find, creating a neighbourhood known in Argentina as a “villa”. Sadly, these villas are usually built in areas which are really not fit for development, such as areas prone to flooding. This leads to a situation where shoddy construction breaks down in floods and creates accidental dams that make flooding even worse.”
Drew Reed on recent flooding in La Plata.
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For Sydney Writers’ Festival 2013, garbage trucks have been decorated with literature. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure!
My tag list needs some new additions - what tags do you follow to keep up with interesting urbanism stories?
- Joe
These two Baltimore districts would look very different today if plans in the 1960s to build a highway right through them had been realised. However, the city started building the highway and then stopped, with weird results. Our latest post looks at Baltimore’s road that leads to nowhere.
“To answer the question “How can a city control its Street Art?” Let’s look at an analogy in a different field: wildfires. In wild areas in Spain, the government adopts a zero-tolerance policy. However, the forest ecosystem depends on fires for its well-being. To attempt to suppress forest fires allows vegetation to grow unchecked, so in the dry summer months, the smallest ground fires can quickly spread to the canopy, where it becomes an unstoppable inferno. The right policy is to provoke controlled fires which allows for appropriate stratification, that is, layering of the woods so that a ground fire stays a ground fire. If a zero-tolerance policy is adopted towards Street Art, undeveloped tagging will go on the increase. Professional artists will move to other countries. Unrest, especially among the budding Street artists, will grow.”
Ian Currie on street art culture in Spanish cities.
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That’s how we do directions in London town.
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An abandoned Atlanta school’s bathroom is slowly reclaimed by ivy and kudzu.
People leave, and nature returns.
(via sircle)
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Recent flooding in La Plata, Argentina, sends a clear message to all cities: now is the time to take a close look at drainage systems and try to find solutions to increase their effectiveness. More in our latest post.
It is 150 years since the world’s first underground railway system was created. These posters are from the London Transport Museum’s exhibition titled Poster Art 150: London Underground’s Greatest Designs. (via Brain Picker)
Modern day London would never use the temperature of the underground as a marketing tool!
(via theaccidentalarchitect)
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The Caribbean island of Montserrat has been abandoned since 1995, due to high volcanic activity
“While projects like highways are meant to propel growth by making areas more accessible, they can also eradicate what makes them worth visiting altogether, causing decline instead.”
Scott Beyer on the impact highways can have on cities.
