Monthly Archives: April 2011

An open city is a place where everyone feels welcome, regardless of such things as wealth, race, age, or religion. In every neighborhood of an open city, one feels like he or she belongs. However in Baltimore—as in most American … Continue reading →

The People’s Roulette is a temporary, public sculpture located in the Nashan District of Shenzhen, China. The inspiration for the piece began with an image of the 1950′s Human Roulette at Coney Island, New York. In looking at the economic … Continue reading →

“ ‘The Ruins of Detroit’ is the title of a body of work by two amazingly talented self-taught French photographers: Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre. Both photographers have a fascination with ruins and in 2005, after seeing photos of Detroit, … Continue reading →

“Festival of Ideas for the New City is a major new collaborative initiative in New York involving scores of Downtown organizations working together to harness the power of the creative community to imagine the future city and explore ideas that … Continue reading →

James Howard Kunstler shows some spot-on examples on how so much of America got so ugly.

London Sound Survey is an online archive of the cities sounds with hundreds of Creative Commons recordings. More are added each week. Sound maps have ambient recordings covering London from Ruislip to Rainham. Sound actions include market traders, pub singers, … Continue reading →

Concrete Islands is a group exhibition of photography and video exploring contemporary experiences of utopian architectural projects. For many architects modernism was a physical manifestation of human progress and, as architectural historian Colin Rowe wrote in The Architecture of Good … Continue reading →

Urbanized is a feature-length documentary about the design of cities, which looks at the issues and strategies behind urban design and features some of the world’s foremost architects, planners, policymakers, builders, and thinkers. Over half the world’s population now lives … Continue reading →

The Hypothetical Development Organisations strategy is to propose and render a series of speculative architectural detours and additions to New Orleans, “dedicated to the recognition and extension of a new form of urban storytelling.” Each project, they explain, is merely … Continue reading →

40 years ago Finnish photographer Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen came to Byker as a founder member of Amber. Her photographs from the working class Tyneside terraced streets became an exhibition and book; wove their way through Amber’s film Byker (1983). Studied and … Continue reading →