urban

Monday 12 November

  • Lost Places in Japan (21:28) - Urban and not-so-urban exploration in Japan. Japanese language site so you may want to try this babelfish translated version. Or you can just look at the photos and enjoy.... | 2 Comments

Tuesday 26 June

  • Ironworkers over Philadelphia (00:16) - The Philadelphia Inquirer has an excellent slideshow of ironworkers high above Philadelphia building the new Comcast building. Located in Center City, the Comcast building will be the tallest building in Philadelphia, surpassing One Liberty Place. [via j-walkblog.com]... | 1 Comments

Monday 19 December

  • Top 12 Public Squares in the U.S. and Canada (03:07) - Although heavily dominated by New York City parks, this list also features the new Campus Martius park in Detroit at #4. Compare with last year's 20 best neighborhoods.... | 3 Comments

Thursday 27 October

  • Command-V (15:53) - Command-V is paste. Get it?... | 5 Comments

Thursday 1 September

  • Patriotism at $3.37/gal (10:09) - The Gulf station at 22nd & Spring Garden St. Philadelphia, PA. I had breakfast across the street for $2.33. It included two eggs, hash browns, toast, orange juice and coffee. Which is the better deal? How much is gas... | 14 Comments

Thursday 30 June

  • Google Earth vs. Real Life (14:41) - Google Earth was released this week. The technology, originally bought from Keyhole, allows you to view the globe via satellite imagery blended with 3D city models, street maps, points of interest, crime statistics.. the list goes on. When I... | 2 Comments

Wednesday 29 June

  • final freedom tower design... seriously (20:28) - Over a year and a half ago the "final design for the WTC site was unveiled"... or so I thought. Today a new "final design" has been unveiled. If you ask me, they should stop unveiling and start building. If... | 8 Comments

Thursday 9 June

  • grafarc (20:25) - This site has a pretty cool interface for viewing graffiti with respect to time. ... | 0 Comments

Wednesday 6 April

  • NY’s Solar-Powered, Litter-Compacting Trash Can (10:37) - Up to 300 gallons of waste--or four-to-ten times the amount held by the average bin--can be housed in the BigBelly at a time. As a result, up to 75% less collection trips are needed by sanitation workers and their heavily... | 1 Comments

Wednesday 16 March

  • Street art for mobile phones (20:51) - Wooster Collective is launching Wooster Mobile an art gallery of images you can download onto your mobile phones in cities around the world. Each artist receives a royalty payment from every download you make of their work. In addition,... | 0 Comments

Monday 7 March


Saturday 12 February

  • London Underground (12:10) - London Underground Warning - very bad language and 750k but well crafted critique of the state of the transport system in London. ...

Wednesday 9 February

  • Art in Cities (13:14) - An art gallery called city Cities are like a huge art gallery with a permanently changing exhibition. Art is submitted everywhere and constantly. The art is not made by the direction of an institution or company, but are short...

Wednesday 2 February

  • NYC declares war on cyclists (11:14) - Cory Doctorow: New York has declared war on bicyclists. Last week, participants in the monthly "Critical Mass" ride were dragged from their bikes and arrested, their wheels confiscated (this amid a climate where city lawmakers are proposing to ban...

Thursday 27 January

  • Thew new hot address: The World, Dubai, UAE (18:22) - Apparently not content on building artificial palm tree-shaped islands, they are now building an artificial map of the planet Earth off the shores of Dubai. You can now own the island of Ohio or Michigan or even Japan, on which...

Wednesday 15 December


Monday 13 December

  • World's tallest building will not be in New York (20:11) - The construction of what will be the world's tallest building is set to begin in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.The building is going to be roughly 2600ft tall and house 160 stories....

Wednesday 8 December

  • Santa Mail (13:03) - Seen on a street in Ann Arbor......

Tuesday 30 November

  • America's Most Dangerous Cities (13:54) - Camden, NJ overtook Detroit this year to become the most dangerous city in the US based on per-capita crime statistics. For cities with a population of 500,000 or more, Detroit tops the list with Philadelphia coming in at #6 and...

Monday 4 October

  • Herman Gardens (23:12) - Where else but Detroit can a completely developed residential neighborhood turn into an urban prairie in three decades? Mouse over the image in the link to compress that into an eyeblink. ...

Saturday 11 September

  • Socialized Highway System (11:10) - The Interstate legislation, as enacted in 1956, put a stop to new toll-road construction, and we instead proceeded with a socialized transportation system, available to the consumer at no charge, mostly paid for from general revenue. Toll-road construction ceased, and...

Thursday 9 September

  • Suburbs and Poverty (12:34) - Something that I've noticed around Detroit but never fully registered is the huge disparity in affluence between the inner/older, where the old 8 Mile boundary has shifted outwards, and outer/newer suburbs: The Suburbanization of Poverty. Today, 13.8 million poor Americans...

Friday 20 August

  • Vagrant Gaze (10:50) - Vagrant Gaze: Photography and Interviews by NYC Homeless. Some homeless folk were given disposable cameras in New York. This site has their photos and stories....

Tuesday 17 August

  • I make death look fun (22:12) - Here is what happens when you strap a video camera to a bike messenger's helmet and watch him race through the streets. These dudes have balls, big ones. ...
  • Rap Snacks (10:42) - I was walking down the street last night when I saw an empty bag of chips laying on the sidewalk. On the bag was everyones favorite Ol' Dirty Bastard, Dirt McGirt. The chips themselves were called Rap Snacks. I had...

Friday 13 August

  • Ebay buys a 25% stake in craigslist.org (16:54) - Craigslist has been a wonderfully untainted resource of online classifieds for nearly 10 years now. I am afraid those days may be coming to a close as eBay has bought a 25% stake in the site. The two companies said...

Wednesday 30 June

  • Urban Modeling in Philadelphia (12:16) - The Cartographic Modeling Laboratory at UPenn offers a number of tools for exploring urban data in Philadelphia. New residents or those looking to move elsewhere in the city can benefit from the interactive crimebase map and neighborhood information map. If...

Saturday 29 May

  • Familiar Strangers (09:35) - Jabberwocky is a piece of software for bluetooth enabled mobile phones, developed by the familiar stranger project out of Intel Research at Berkeley. The idea behind the software is simple: on any given day in the city you pass thousands...

Thursday 20 May


Sunday 9 May

  • Quik House (16:49) - Awhile ago I had started collecting links for prefab housing stuff like the Loft Cube and LOT/EK. Quik House was another one that I was planning on posting all together but, as usual, forgot to. The advantage of Quik House...

Thursday 6 May

  • LOT/EK Shipping Container Housing (18:09) - Here is an article about the shipping container housing I mentioned in a comment in the previous post. I'm not sure what kind of shopping malls they were looking at for inspiration in the United States, whether enclosed or strip....
  • Loft Cube (12:12) - Being in the market for buying a place to live, the loft cube interests me. At about 387 square feet it is a bit small, but no smaller than your average Manhattan studio. The cube has some innovative and functional...

Wednesday 14 April

  • Abondoned Stations (13:52) - The New York Times ran an article about the original subway line in New York City and the stations along the way that have been lost in the 100 years since the line's birth. I have always been a big...

Saturday 28 February

  • crosswalk buttons... mechanical placebos (22:40) - According to this article in the Times, over 2500 of New York City's 3250 crosswalk buttons are inoperable, and have been for some time. "Most of the buttons scattered through the city, mainly outside of Manhattan, are relics of the...

Tuesday 24 February

  • SimCity (13:12) - The UK has a new weapon to fight flooding, a 3D SimCity-like video game called FloodRanger which allows players to budget and plan for jobs, housing, infrastructure, and, of course, flooding. The player can build dams or reservoirs but must...

Sunday 15 February

  • Utopolis (16:40) - Started in 1996 this oceanfront development of skyscrapers expands along an avenue of parallel to a fictitious shore. This skyscraper city is made out of LEGOs. While the buildings do look cool, something seems to be amiss. Is it the...

Sunday 1 February

  • S.S. United States (13:24) - Every time I am in South Philadelphia I can see two decaying smokestacks peaking out near the waterfront. A closer view reveals an enormous abandoned cruise ship, the S.S. United States. The United States was the largest and fastest cruise...

Thursday 15 January

  • Bad Restaurant Conversions (01:52) - Something I noticed a lot of when I first moved to Michigan: a lot of local restaurants dwelling in the obvious former shells of chain restaurants. Now there's a site for such bad conversions and the very first on deck...

Monday 12 January

  • Abandoned Bikes (16:16) - Stripped, destroyed, and abandoned. You see these bikes locked up and forgotten on the street, often near colleges. Was it destroyed because it couldn't be stolen, abandoned because it was stripped or destroyed? Sometimes bikes in their entirety, slightly rotted,...

Thursday 1 January

  • Mummers Parade (23:23) - Unless you live in Philly you probobly have never heard of the Mummers. On New Years day about 15,000 mummers participate in a day-long parade / competition. Had I not been nursing a hangover for most of the day I...

Friday 19 December

  • Final design for WTC site unveiled. (12:11) - Officials presented today the final design of the building to be constructed on the World Trade Center site, revealing a slender curving tower that will rise 1,776 feet above downtown New York City, a height symbolic of the year of...

Wednesday 10 December

  • Urban Farming in a Post-Industrial Detroit (02:10) - Grassroots projects are taking root in Detroit's urban wasteland, literally. Volunteer, student, and neighborhood groups (as well as anarchist groups like Trumbullplex, but for other reasons) are either buying up long vacant lots on the cheap or simply taking custodianship...

Wednesday 26 November

  • Terrorist Advertising (01:56) - The Neistat Brothers' "dirtylittlesecret" video makes me wonder: Are they no better than terrorists or are they simply exercising their freedom of speech in a public forum? We are surrounded by exposed surfaces which steal our focus by otherwise blocking...

Monday 10 November

  • message in a bottle (13:32) - We were walking downtown last night when I found a message in a bottle in the strangest place....

Saturday 8 November

  • another reason to love philly. (08:38) - http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/Northeast/10/31/crime.girls.reut/index.html PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania (Reuters) -- A man described by authorities as a known sexual predator was chased through the streets of South Philadelphia by an angry crowd of Catholic high school girls, who kicked and punched him after he was...

Tuesday 7 October

  • Angle Grinder Man (10:26) - I saw this article in the New York Times this morning and couldn't pass it up. Some guy in London dressed as a super hero and armed with an angle grinder is liberating illegally parked cars from the security boots...

Friday 3 October

  • A2 Shopping Cart Race VI (17:48) - Ok. A couple weeks ago at the end of Ann Arbor Punk Week, there was a shopping cart race. This race, along with Punk Week, has become a tradition here, this being the 6th one so far. I neglected to...

Thursday 2 October

  • Ypsilanti (18:53) - I went into the hip boutique in Ypsilanti a few weeks ago and they had the most awesomest stuff. "I ...

Tuesday 23 September