Urban knitting, guerilla knitting, textile street art,
yarn bombing. Whatever you choose to call it, this artform takes everyday objects of the city — such as trees, lampposts, street signs, bike racks — and wraps them up in colorful knit cozies. You'll find these wonderful oddities all over the world, from
Manhattan to
Sydney to Edinburgh to
Philadelphia to Oakland to
Chicago to
Bisbane and back to
Manhattan again. People have
written books about it. It has inspired an
Irish cellphone commercial. Metafilter's own
ErikaB made a
tree sweater that was featured on
Metafilter and on the front cover of Seattle's
The Stranger. Magda Sayeg's blog
Knitta Please is a showcase for some of her delightful projects, including a
Smart car,
coffee shop sign, and
crutches. (
Also, previously.)
[more inside]
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Jun 25, 2010 -
37 comments
David Byrne has just published a new book about bicycles called
Bicycle Diaries. A long time rider, Byrne muses on how the world looks and works from the vantage point of a cyclist. It's
getting pretty good reviews. To launch the book, Byrne is touring the US and arranging public forums. Each event features a civic leader, an urban theorist, a bicycle advocate, and Byrne himself speaking about bikes in cities. Here’s a
schedule of the upcoming events. He’s also designed some
bike racks for his hometown of New York City.
[more inside]
posted by Toekneesan
on Sep 27, 2009 -
28 comments
Abandoned London is a Flickr set by photographer
IanVisits of London on Christmas morning when the city is (
almost) denuded of people. Very disorienting if you've been to London (or any major city, really). I got this via William Gibson's blog and I'll let him describe it in his inimitable way: "Christmas, particularly in the early morning, has always seemed so much more liminal to me than New Year's eve. Spectral, deeply in-between [...] something about the way in which traffic, pedestrian and vehicular, controls one's depth of field, fragmenting and animating the experience."
posted by Kattullus
on Dec 31, 2008 -
20 comments
"The plans for Victory City have evolved over a period of 38 years, nurtured by the vision and dedication of Victory City's inventor,
Orville Simpson II [
no relation]. Mr. Simpson conceived of the general idea of Victory City in 1936, when he was only 13 years old. Afraid of being ridiculed, Mr. Simpson kept his ideas about designing and building the City of the Future to himself … a secret vision he held in his mind... It wasn't until 1960 — after he had embarked on a lucrative career in real estate investing and apartment building management — that Mr. Simpson decided to make his ideas about Victory City known to the general public."
posted by Miko
on Dec 7, 2008 -
35 comments
Queen Street: Thematic Preview - "Queen Street is one of Toronto's oldest, longest, and most varied routes. It began in 1793 as a line on a map, running dead straight for ten miles, in modern measure some 16 kilometres. It is the spine, the high street, the main street of many distinct, and quite different, neighbourhoods. The street's fine grain is a cavalcade of urban variety, where the grain is broken by parks, institutions, industry. Queen Street is a promenade of public life, one you can stroll for 16 kilometres. I have, all of it, often camera in hand: I wanted others to see it, to know something of its life. And its gifts — meant to be shared. Here I'll share with you some of what I have seen along, and just off, Queen Street."
posted by heatherann
on Aug 3, 2006 -
5 comments
The Urban Pantheist is the livejournal of Jef Taylor, where he works out articles for his two zines:
The Urban Pantheist: Loving Nature while Living in the City and
Urban Nature Walk. The LJ became a bit more as he embarked on a project called
365 Urban Species, where he'll post a current photo and short article about a different living thing found in the city each day.
posted by FunkyHelix
on Jul 16, 2006 -
10 comments
Is a "virtual" Philly even better than the real thing? Well,
GeoSim Systems thinks so. Except for the aroma of freshly-grilled cheesesteak, at least. Their "Virtual Philadelphia" is the most detailed urban imaging system I've seen yet, and you can read about the monumental process of turning photographic images (taken from both aircraft and street-level) into this incredible rendering in a February 17 NY
Times article (reg req). And - as expected - Google wants to get in on the action and
do the same thing in San Francisco.
via BB
posted by luriete
on Jun 10, 2005 -
29 comments
The Urban Archipelago. "It's time to state something that we've felt for a long time but have been too polite to say out loud: Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America. We live on islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion--New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and on and on. And we live on islands in red states too--a fact obscured by that state-by-state map."
posted by gentle
on Nov 16, 2004 -
54 comments
