CityTV to apologize for photos stolen from Flickr. The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has issued a ruling that CityTV must make a rare on-air apology for broadcasting pictures taken from Flickr without crediting the photographer.
posted on May 8, 2008 - View this thread

Two visions of the ideal city rise in the Persian Gulf: "Waterfront City will probably be where a lot of Middle Eastern investors will put their money—and where international architectural stars will build their putative landmarks—but if little Masdar develops successfully, it may hold much more important lessons for us all."
posted on Apr 27, 2008 - View this thread

40's-50's-Fun-Filter: glglglgl-prt-HIC! What soothing melodies do I hear? honk!honk!honk! Is it geese mating? Ibidi? Ibiduh. Ibidih? eauugh! No, it's Spike Jones and his City Slickers!
posted on Mar 29, 2008 - View this thread

New York's Governor Eliot Spitzer (Wiki) has been linked to a high-class prostitution ring.
posted on Mar 10, 2008 - View this thread

She works six days a week and has sold her husband - twice.
posted on Jan 27, 2008 - View this thread

Sex, drugs and sleaze! Were the bad old days really the good old days? Native New Yorkers who remember the City in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, speak up! Was the Big Apple better off then or now?
posted on Jan 23, 2008 - View this thread

City Farmer is a Vancouver-based organization that's been promoting urban agriculture since 1978. If you dig around their sprawling website, you can find everything from this feel-good news story, to a series of links leading to a nice deep free book. Alternatively, their new blog has cool pictures.
posted on Jan 20, 2008 - View this thread

Hugh Ferriss: Delineator of Gotham. Through his charcoal renderings of dramatic, imaginary skyscrapers in early 1900s New York City, Ferriss influenced the aesthetics of numerous architects with his bold compositions.
posted on Jan 6, 2008 - View this thread

Steve Reich's CITY LIFE: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5
posted on Jan 2, 2008 - View this thread

MetaFilter: A small city in Albania? This is, to be perfectly clear, a link to a site designed primarily with the intent of getting people to link to it.
posted on Dec 17, 2007 - View this thread

Defying Demographics: A look at University Park Campus School, a 7-12th grade school located in the poorest neighborhood in blue-collar Worcester, MA. Approximately 73% of students hover at or below the poverty line and 61% are minorities, yet over 80% go on to college and 99% pass the Massachusetts graduation exams. The partnership between Clark University and Worcester Public Schools has created an environment so successful that a number of cities are looking to emulate it. Have they discovered the key to closing the achievement gap?
posted on Nov 23, 2007 - View this thread

The Garbage Game. What would you do with 64,000 tons of garbage every week? The Gotham Gazette is a not-for-profit newspaper that reports on New York City politics and policy. On their site is a highly informative game that puts you in the place of a resident and then the Sanitation Commissioner, shedding some light on NYC's garbage problem.
posted on Nov 14, 2007 - View this thread

Top 101 Cities Lists (in the US)
posted on Nov 6, 2007 - View this thread

Derinkuyu wasn't discovered until 1965, when a resident cleaning the back wall of his cave house broke through a wall and discovered behind it a room that he'd never seen, which led to still another, and another. Eventually, spelunking archeologists found a maze of connecting chambers that descended at least 18 stories and 280 feet beneath the surface, ample enough to hold 30,000 people. [flickr]. [wiki].
posted on Aug 31, 2007 - View this thread

Getting around underground in NYC is no longer only for people who already know how to get around underground in NYC. Graphic Designer Eric Jabbour has been spending his free time obsessively redesigning MTA transit maps. And the results are striking. Non-New Yorkers will undoubtedly be able to figure out what's what. Cleaner lines and neighborhood boundaries are just a few features. Also, one can clearly see and understand transfer points and more street names.
posted on Apr 26, 2007 - View this thread

Animated Pixelated Cities: Gaze at the extreme pixelated detail of the neighborhoods of Pixeldam (including a pixel Starbucks with tiny coffees and a pixel strip club) or the science fiction themed PixelMoon, collectively generated by over a hundred contributors. There is also the slightly less impressive PixelPlaza and the oddness of IsoCity and Sumea, as well as the impressive work of eboy [prev]. Ready to try yourself, but don't have the pixel skills? City Creator has you covered.
posted on Apr 13, 2007 - View this thread

Judge blocks damaging articles, bloggers republish them in defiance here and here. Will the Kansas City utility board sue them, too?
posted on Mar 5, 2007 - View this thread

Somehow the Canon City, Colorado branch of the KKK was not quite as fear-inspiring as their brethren to the South. Home page.
posted on Feb 16, 2007 - View this thread

The City Desk is a blog dedicated to covering the history and traditions of a city that does not exist. Get the dirt on about the tramway that never happened or take a gander at fascinating statistics about the population. Heck, there's even a definitive origin for the term "Black Friday."
posted on Dec 22, 2006 - View this thread

City in Flames Twenty Five years ago the City of Lynn Massachusetts experienced its second great fire. Devastating several downtown industrial buildings dating to the rise of the Shoe industry. All of which were undergoing redevelopment. While nowhere near as big as the Great Boston Fire of 1872, or the various Chelsea fires, the tragedy of the story is the empty wasteland that still sits after all these years. Today the Boston Globe dug up several articles from their pre Web vaults. The Lynn Museum has an exhibit, and the Lynn Library will have a slideshow.
posted on Nov 28, 2006 - View this thread

Running from a voodoo spirit. The urban game Crossroads is one of the featured games from last weeks Come Out and Play (yes, another FPP!) Posting because this game is still running this weekend.

Using GPS cell phones, players are trying to take over intersections in lower manhattan, like playing Go. But the Baron Samedi is in the grid with them, and one thing I know is that you don't want him to touch you... which is weird because he doesn't actually exist. You end up getting chased down Hudson street by something invisible. Feels like the future.

Part of an exhibition called the Good Life that closes this weekend.
posted on Sep 29, 2006 - View this thread

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 on Aug 3, 2006 - View this thread

Manhattan Timeformations. Mapping Manhattan's skyscraper districts through time. [more]
posted on Aug 2, 2006 - View this thread

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 on Jul 16, 2006 - View this thread

Naked in the Naked City. Artist Miru Kim takes curiously compelling nude photos of herself in gritty and deserted urban settings like sewers, subway stations, railroad tracks, tunnels, abandoned factories and asylums. (via)
posted on Jun 18, 2006 - View this thread

Samarra is in the news. The modern city is small, but built on the colossal ruins of the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate. Google Earth reveals amazing details of the ancient city, one of the largest archaeological sites in the world.
posted on Feb 24, 2006 - View this thread

"Kowloon Walled City resembled a living, breathing creature, born from its inhabitants over its long lifespan." "...occupying an area of approximately 200 by 150 metres. Most of the 500 buildings in the City, housing almost 50,000 residents" (MI)
posted on Feb 23, 2006 - View this thread

The "D" stands for Demolition. In an attempt at building awareness of Detroit's rotting, decaying neighborhoods(as if one needed further awareness), the Detroit Demolition Disneyland project finds long-abandoned, neglected structures that the city has failed to demolish and paints them with Tiggerific Orange paint.
posted on Feb 15, 2006 - View this thread

Ray Bradbury proposes monorail-bulding in LA.
via
posted on Feb 11, 2006 - View this thread

Visualising Networks is fun. So are Monkey Networks (ppt). Dolphin Networks (pdf). Ant networks can aide network design. Does the Brain Work Like the Internet? Can the Internet Think? The Social Superorganism and its Global Brain? Webog Inequality. A City Is Not a Tree. The I Ching, a network of 384 pathways. The Whole, the Parts, and the Holes. Heterarchy, the secret of Japan, Inc.? Sense/non-sense;hierarchy/heterarchy... Heterachy and Heirarchy: Two Complimenatary categorises of description (pdf). Summary: "Our most significant problems cannot be solved at the same level of thinking at which we produced them." (attributed to Einstein)
posted on Jan 26, 2006 - View this thread

Welcome to Cold War City It covers 240 acres and has 60 miles of roads and its own railway station. It even includes a pub called the Rose and Crown. Oh, and it's underground. And for sale. Much more interesting than the article, though, are these photo galleries.
posted on Oct 31, 2005 - View this thread

Ed Bacon, friend to skaters, died Friday. He presided over a successful urban renewal campaign (a rarity), yet leaves behind a complex legacy in the city he loved. [bugmenot]
posted on Oct 16, 2005 - View this thread

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 on Jun 10, 2005 - View this thread

Best laid schemes? Back in 1945 the Bruce Plan [click on images for video footage] was a radical proposal to knock down, and then rebuild, the Victorian centre of the city of Glasgow. The city’s slums* would be cleared; new towns* would be established; Glasgow would rise again, triumphant, once again the second city of the Empire*. In 1971*, there were grand visions of the Glasgow of the future; the Glasgow of tomorrow would be a bright, shining new city, and the Clyde* would once again be something to be proud of. A fascinating film archive of the Glasgow of the 20th century. *All links contain embedded video goodness.
posted on May 17, 2005 - View this thread

Art in Cities. Pretty cool.
posted on Feb 9, 2005 - View this thread

His ability to create a home in a city drawbridge was instinctual. "You've got to be kind of agile," he said. "You can't be a idiot.... It doesn't take long to figure out what you need to do. How long has mankind lived in caves? The first time it was scary. After that, it was almost like riding a Ferris wheel.''
posted on Dec 14, 2004 - View this thread

No bicycling in NYC without a license? That's right, a new law -- apparently the first of its kind in the nation -- proposed this week by bike-bashing Bronx Councilwoman Madeline Provenzano, will carry serious fines and even jail sentences for violators who ride unregistered bicycles on city streets. And yes, there will be a $25 per bike registration fee. Way to encourage alternative transport in this crowded, congested, polluted town. What next? Licenses for rollerblades, skateboards, wheelchairs? How about my running shoes -- during peak traffic they're faster and more hazardous to fellow city dwellers than my beat up old Trek, any day.
posted on Nov 19, 2004 - View this thread

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 on Nov 16, 2004 - View this thread

The Situationists famously had their own ideas about cities, and about how to city them; in particular, they held forth the derive, or aimless drift, as the ideal way to encounter and make sense of urban place. It's easy to caricature the derive as an essentially passive mode of experience, but it was intended to be anything but: a playful, lively, engaged, and above all social act.

Now that cities are where most of us live, for better or worse, and we have the ability to document our travels through these conurbations and share them over the Web, might it be safe to say that Situationist psychogeography has gone mainstream? That the moblogged drift, in fact, takes things to an entirely new level, by making the city and its flows not merely more legible to ourselves, but visible to a potentially global audience?
posted on Sep 23, 2004 - View this thread

I've just finished reading a copy of Larson's Devil in the White City sent to me by a relative who heard of my love for Isaac's Storm. Devil is a biography of two men who were central to the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. One, Daniel H. Burnham would become one of the most influential architects and city planners of the early 20th century. Burnham organized a crew of the architectural, engineering and artistic elite including landscape artist Frederick Law Olmstead (famous for Central Park and Biltmore) in an effort to better the Paris world's fair of 1889. The Chicago exposition would be profoundly influential for American culture introducing Arabic Dance (the tune for "There's a place in France/where the naked ladies dance" was created in Chicago), the Ferris Wheel, Shredded Wheat, and helping to settle the Battle of the Currents between Edison and Tesla. The fair drew a large variety of larger than life figures including Archduke Ferdinand, Elizabeth B. Anthony, Buffalo Bill Cody and the mostly forgotten master of self promotion Citizen Train.

Devil is also a biography of the man given credit for America's first recognized serial murders, the self-named H. H. Holmes. At the start of the fair, Holmes changed his modus operandi from marrying and killing women as part of insurance and real estate scams, to running a hotel from which an unknown number of his female tenants never checked out. Although information on Holmes's activities is scanty, he serves as a mirror of the utopia of civic safety created by Burnham. Larson makes the argument that the contrasts between optimisim and pessimism, well-intentioned virtue and depravity, urban utopia with a few blocks from slums, would set the tone for the 20th century.
posted on Aug 7, 2004 - View this thread

City-Data has a lot of statistics on about every city, town and village in the US. While there is nothing new about this service, I enjoyed being able to compare cities and towns of interest. What inspired me to post it here though, are the pages of random pictures submitted to the site from all over the country. Basically, you get a diverse collage of how people see their own locals. Here's a nice example.
posted on Apr 25, 2004 - View this thread

The Random Wisconsin City Name Generator. Every state needs one!
posted on Nov 4, 2003 - View this thread

A large collection of panoramic views of Norwegian cities. Possibly the largest collection of its kind, it gives you the opportunity to navigate trough Oslo, walk into certain shops or just have a look at the famous Vigeland park. With convenient clickable map.
posted on Nov 3, 2003 - View this thread

City Size Comparison lets you, well, compare the relative sizes of various US cities side-by-side. The site also lets you compare US cities to Baghdad, which "may be useful if you are trying to envision driving through, searching or invading Baghdad, but you've never actually been there." [via xblog]
posted on Apr 24, 2003 - View this thread

"Los Angeles is not the city it could have been" An informative and amusing essay on how L.A. went from 'six suburbs in search of a city' to the 'horizontal sublime.' Part of the 3Cities Project.
posted on Apr 7, 2003 - View this thread

Hints of a secret city beneath Tokyo Japanese foreign correspondent Shun Akiba says that after examining various maps of Tokyo, and finding large inconsistences, he has found evidence of a huge network of tunnels beneath the city of Tokyo. A large underground city beneath an aboveground one is not unheard of, as Beijing has this one, but the odd part is, (assuming this story is true,) is that Shun says there has been a coverup and a "...conspiracy to silence [me]," with officials being "...defensive and noncooperative..."
posted on Mar 4, 2003 - View this thread

Give a group of Amsterdamers a GPS tracking device for a couple of months, plot their movements over a black background, and the resulting traces map the city through the movements of its inhabitants. Alternately, make your own GPS art, or play GPS Hide and Seek.
posted on Jan 24, 2003 - View this thread

City Living Linked to Risk of Psychotic Symptoms Growing up in the suburbs never looked so good...
posted on Jul 15, 2001 - View this thread

Do you have a favourite city park? Nominate it for the Great Parks/Great Cities Awards, to be presented this July in New York. And read about Dufferin Grove Park in Toronto; neighbors came together to help the city manage the park when they found out that the Parks Department had allotted no money for its upkeep.
posted on Jun 12, 2001 - View this thread

Washington DC Metro Popularity is Possible Problem as physical limitations may hinder expansion and usability in future years.
posted on Mar 26, 2001 - View this thread