A 900m-tall snow-capped artificial mountain has been proposed by architect Jacob Tigges as an iconic landmark for the German city of Berlin

The City of Nanaimo is not alone in recognising this global need. The US Federal Government has recently committed to embrace OpenID to allow simple access to citizen resources (http://openid.net/government/). As of November 2008, there were over 500 million OpenIDs on the Internet and approximately 27,000 sites had integrated the OpenID standard*. (* see - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID)

With almost 30 projects and proposals addressing the opportunities and challenges of water in/around/under/through the city, we are excited to announce the HYDROCity exhibition opening tonight at the Toronto Free Gallery (1277 Bloor St W).

The City of Toronto (City) now grants you a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to use, modify, and distribute the datasets in all current and future media and formats for any lawful purpose. more

Theme of the symposium was “la ville cartographiée” (the city map), and to give our contribute to the discussion, we were warmly welcome to the ‘Cité des sciences et de l’industrie‘; built in the 19th arrondissement, just beside Parc de la Villette, ‘La Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie’ is one of the world’s largest and most visited science museums, and looks as an impressive modern site which offers a wide variety of exhibitions and shows.

By removing the unnecessary, this New York City map-cut reveals the “paths, nodes, circles, boulevards, parks and streets” of the greatest city in the world.

On November 5, Urban Age will inaugurate an intensive two-day conference on the future of cities in Istanbul, an expanding metropolis and one of the worlds first global cities. 100 innovators of urban change from 15 countries, half a dozen mayors, renowned scholars and authors side-by-side with architects and developers leading major urban regeneration projects around the globe will offer presentations about urban transformations in 25 cities. The conference will engage an invited audience of over 300 urban policymakers, academics, designers, planners and developers to explore the vast and complex challenge of contemporary city making and the interconnected issues of the impact of the global economic condition on world cities, the effect of climate change on urban sustainability and the role of urban design in creating socially cohesive environments.

The Alphabet City series challenges us to rethink ideas central to our lives. In each volume writers and artists address single theme from many perspectives, revealing its processes and possibilities.

Montreal Events

31 November

12pm (Book Launch)

Canadian Centre for Architecture Bookstore

1920, rue Baile

Montreal, Quebec

(514) 939-7026

Water Launch

In the 1960s and 70s research chemist and amateur photographer Derek Fairbrother made over 20 photographic time-lapse sequences showing the demolition of old buildings and their replacement by new buildings and road systems in Birmingham city centre.

Well, most of the work is done by Earthdesk and GeekTool 3.

Earthdesk is set to Natural Color, Equirectangular projection, Natural Color, Real Moonlight, centered on Vienna, Background: Starfield. Zoom 80%, Clouds 80%, Brightness 80%.

In GeekTool, the times and the weathers are all separate Shell "geeklets".

Times are generated by running shell commands like

env TZ=Asia/Tokyo date " %l:%M %p"

every 20 seconds

The weather is the tricky part. The way I am doing it now, if I am not careful, gets me throttled for too many concurrent requests to the wunderground.com API server. It also fails badly if I am disconnected, so I will need to do it differently.

FWIW: I have a PHP script which I run as separate Shell Geeklets. I invoke it with the name of the city I want. It then hits wunderground and gets back an XML stream of the local weather, which I parse, format and echo. (the way I'd change this is run the script from cron, with a 30 second wait between requests, and cache the results locally, which I would then call from the Shell Geeklets)

From there it's just a question of setting fonts, sizes, colors and moving the little Geeklet boxes around as you want them.

architects Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder “have created a virtual map to guide users around Manhattan to sites where projects they describe as ‘visionary’ were planned but never built. The map is available as an interactive iPhone application…that uses GPS technology to detect when a user is near any of the roughly 50 notable sites, triggering a feature that allows the user to learn about the proposal through the architect’s foiled designs and words.

you said: “Especially given the by-now-clichéd recognition that we’ve decisively become an urban species”

It is indeed very interesting to think about urban systems design given there was a major move toward cities. That said I have the feeling that this move comes with, at least, three issues:

1. access to the “thought” urban environment,

2. the space left where 50% of the population is still living,

3. the space of this growth

There are many areas in the world where the growth of the cities is made by people without access or a limited access to the thought urban environment. Poor people living in slums or just in a space which is not part of the work of urban planner per say. In a recent exhibition about slums I went, it was very interesting to see that the organic structure of the slums was making possible for the individuals to create a rich and meaningful space, driving sometimes to less criminality than more traditional areas of the city. The slum is a forced collective creative space for survival.

The rest of the population, the 50% living in deserted areas are the forgotten of this story. It’s indeed more “fun”, interesting for researchers, sociologists to observe and think about the density in urban space (richness of interactions) more than the low level of activities in the “countryside”. Though there are equal challenges there in terms of design and space organization, access to services, etc.

Finally, is it really cities which are growing? What we call urban space often relates to the city center, but I have the feeling that the growth is happening in the in-between space (suburbs), which is again a complete disaster in terms of design, even more so in rich countries. The private space is becoming a space of non-creativity, dead areas of non activities. Someone, who wants to start a small business in between two buildings on the grass of a random suburb of a rich city, will not last for very long. Complete different dynamic than the slum where unregulated areas give the opportunity of creative solutions for surviving or living.

44.5% of people use the Tube map to walk round London.

The architecture of science fiction has profoundly changed urban design. When building cities of the future, our best guides may be places like comic book megalopolises Mega-City-1 or Transmet.