City of Anarchy: Kowloon Walled City Illustrated
Aus einem Artikel der South China Morning Post über die Kowloon Walled City: Eine tolle Risszeichnung mit Erklärungen zu städtischen Einrichtungen wie Schulen oder den – yep! – von Triaden betriebenen Puffs, Opiumhöhlen und Casinos. Die Einwohnerzahl Kowloon Walled Citys hatte sich seit den Siebzigern jede Dekade verdoppelt, bei gleichbleibendem Raum. Ergebnis war eine fast schon autonome Stadt, die wild bebaut rumwucherte. 1993 wurde die Stadt abgerissen.
A 2.7-hectare enclave of opium parlours, whorehouses and gambling dens run by triads, it was a place where police, health inspectors and even tax collectors feared to tread. In Cantonese, it was known as the City of Darkness. But though it may have been a fetid slum, crawling with rats and dripping with sewage, it was stoutly defended to the last by those who lived there, as well as an unlikely ensemble of Chinese shopkeepers, faith healers and self-taught dentists.
It was once thought to be the most densely populated place on earth, with 35,000 people crammed into a few tiny apartment blocks and more than 300 interconnected high-rise buildings, all constructed without contributions from a single architect. But in March 1993, the last batch of residents finally accepted the government’s rehousing terms and compensation terms. It brought down the final curtain on a bizarre chapter of Hong Kong’s colonial past.
Kowloon Walled City: Life in the City of Darkness, hier die Illu als 6MB-JPG mit 3842x6263px (via Chris)
When you really live in [The City]
Tolle Tumblr-Meme, Lokaldingsbums x Reaction-GIFs = When you really live in [The City]. Das erste dieser Tumblrs war wohl When You Live In Berlin, dann kam When You REALLY Live In Berlin, kurz davor kam noch When You Live In Lisbon. Mittlerweile gibt’s einen ganzen Haufen der Dinger:
Hamburg, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Zürich, Wien, Augsburg, Dortmund, When You Live In Munich, When You REALLY Live In Munich, Ankara, Freiburg, Köln und die Extrawurst Fuck Yeah Frankfurt. Weitere dieser Reaction-GIF-Städte-Tumblers bitte in die Kommentare…
[update] When You Live In Stuttgart, When You Live In Münster, When You Really Live In Münster, When You Live In Bochum
[update] When You Live In Bonn
Save the Prinzessinnengarten
Der Prinzessinnengarten ist ein Berliner Urban Farming-Projekt und dessen Existenz ist trotz mehrfacher Auszeichnung mit dem Utopia Award und durch den Rat für Nachhaltige Entwicklung wegen des Verkaufs der Fläche gefährdet. Urban Farming und Neo-Futurismus vs Gentrifizierung. Eine Petition für eine gesicherte Zukunft des Projekts kann man hier unterzeichnen (hab’ ich bereits vor einer Weile gemacht), da fehlen noch 1800 Unterschriften, das ist mehr als machbar, spread the Word. Gute Sache, unbedingt unterstützenswert.
Die Zukunft des Prinzessinnengartens ist ungewiss. Der Liegenschaftsfonds plant einen Verkauf der stadteigenen Fläche am Moritzplatz. Das könnte das baldige Aus des Gartens bedeuten.
Freiräume öffnen Möglichkeiten für soziales Engagement und für neue Formen urbanen Lebens. Sie sind Teil des kreativen, schönen und wilden Berlins, von dem die Politik schwärmt. Der Moritzplatz steht beispielhaft für die Bedrohung dieser Freiräume, aber auch für die Chancen, die sich aus ihnen ergeben. Er könnte zum Modell für eine zukunftsorientierte Liegenschaftspolitik werden, die den Wert von Orten wie dem Prinzessinnengarten Rechnung trägt und die Menschen vor Ort frühzeitig und auf Augenhöhe einbindet.
Floating Cities in the Sky
Reinhard Krug shopt Städte von Berlin bis London in den Himmel. Real Life Cloud Cities, sozusagen, und Hamburg oben sieht auch ein bisschen aus, wie der Millennium Falcon. Prints gibt’s in seinem Etsy-Shop. (via iRef)
Satellite Images of Slums
Business Insider hat ein Posting mit Satellitenfotos von Slums. Stinkt ein bisschen nach „The 1% at the top looking down at the 1% at the bottom“ und das Wort „Shocking“ in der Headline stört mich aus ein paar Gründen, aber die Fotos sind dennoch interessant. Bild oben: „Petare, Venezuela. A slum in Caracas with approximately 600,000 – 1 million people.“
Global slums can be vastly different in nature. Some are working-class neighborhoods that have been torn up by gang wars like the Petare slum in Venezuela. Others like Dharavi in Mumbai, a mini-city that operates as a recycling hub and has a booming leather industry, are a permanent fixture.
Slums like Kibera are notoriously difficult to measure because they often serve as a conduit for people shifting from the country to big cities. This list is not exhaustive and the ones that made our list did so on the basis of their crime rate, size, and population.
A Shocking Satellite Tour Of The World’s Biggest Slums (via MeFi)
Nanans Lamp Toy-Robots
Nanan baut fantastische Lampen in Form von Robotern und Toys. Die urbane AT-ST-Leuchte in Flugzeugtriebwerkoptik will ich jetzt sofort im Wohnzimmer stehen haben! WANT!
Nanans Urban Lights, auf Facebook gibt’s die Bilder auch unge-GIF-t, ein paar mehr davon nach dem Klick. (Danke Jörn!)
TEDxDubai 2011 Opening Titles
Schöne Opening-Titles für die kommende TED-Konferenz in Dubai. Ich finde ja generell die Dekadenz dort auf eine faszinierende Weise abstoßend und blogge selbst nur dann über Luxus und solchen Schrott, wenn er auf die gleiche faszinierende Weise WTF ist. Wie auch immer, die Introsequenz ist dennoch sehr hübsch geworden. Vom TED-Blog:
This spectacular satellite time-lapse sequence shows the growth of Dubai over the past 10 years (while introducing the speakers at last weekend’s TEDxDubai event). Producers METAphrenie took 3 months to produce the clip using imagery from Space Imaging Middle East and DigitalGlobe. As they note:
The titles, together with the event, remind everyone that small things can have a huge impact … and that Dubai’s present grandeur sits on a multitude of tiny grains of sand.
Music by Reiner Erlings.
The beauty of small things: Extraordinary satellite time-lapse titles for TEDxDubai
Podcasts: The Detroit-Berlin Connection
Ich höre mich grade durch die Radioserie „The Detroit-Berlin Connection“ von WDET Detroit Public Radio. Es geht um Abandoned Kram, Techno und den Tresor, Kreativität, Urbanität, Globalisierung, DJ Rolando, Architektur und vieles anderes. Ganz großartig!
Detroit and Berlin are iconic cities; symbols of cultural and economic domination, as well as of collapse, and (potential) rebirth. Detroit and Berlin have ideological similarities that go far beyond industrial power. As beacons of culture, Detroit and Berlin have both been on the cutting edge of arts activities. Berlin is a crossroads of European film, art, music and food; Detroit is a center of African-American culture, with global credibility in jazz, techno, and emerging cultural expressions.
The Detroit – Berlin Connection looks at the futures of these two great cities and looks at the measures being used to reinvent industrial cities for the 21st century.
Evols Underground-City
Tolle Arbeit von Evol, der mit einem Bagger eine begehbare Häuserzeile bei Hamburg in eine Wiese gefräst hat. Super!
berlin-based artist EVOL has installed a miniature city beneath the countryside of rural hamburg, germany, in a project for the ms dockville arts and music festival in august. the project was completed over the course of eight days and will remain at least through the festival’s close on august 14th.
Bookmarks for July 28th: Pandamix, Vintage Australian Lithographs, Mister Cartoon @ the MOCA
Australian Landscapes: 1860s lithographs of Australian bush scenes by EV Guérard accompanied by excerpts of turgid hyperbole served with saccharine verbiage.
Selected: Selected is a series of animated gifs where Mike Guppy replaced the main character with an marching ants outline.
Pandamix Vol. 06 – Clearly It Is Summer 320k by MassNerder on SoundCloud
Space Trek: the quiet despair of the Starship Enterprise
Mister Cartoon : Art In The Streets on Vimeo: Mister Cartoon talks about his artwork in Moca's Art In The Streets Show.
Kosmonautenkult in der DDR – YouTube
Dangerous Minds | Freddie Mercury’s eyeball jumpsuit
Unbound: The Crowdfunding Cargo Cult – Telegraph Blogs: Cargo cult thinking in technology products might have worked in the past, when customers really didn’t know any better and you could overwhelm them with slick marketing campaigns, but things are different now, thanks to online reviews and word-of-mouth. Yet they still try, wasting millions and millions on modern-day equivalents of wooden radar towers, or rather, yet more iPhone and iPad imitators.
Marvelous Destroyers: The Fungus-Farming Beetles | Wired Science | Wired.com: Witness the spread of so-called bark and ambrosia beetles, a collection of 7000 species whose expansion beyond their native ranges threatens trees around the world.It's not the beetles' fault, of course. They've simply happened upon a brilliant life strategy: Rather than eating bark, which tends to be full of toxins produced by trees to discourage predation, they eat fungus that eats bark. It's one of the animal kingdom's greatest and most unappreciated symbioses.
All The Beatles’ albums in sixty one minutes: Steve McLaughlin’s “Run For Your Life” takes all of the Beatles’ officially released UK albums and compresses them into 61 minutes by speeding them up 800%. The result is trippy, maddening and at times quite beautiful. Of course, it would be impossible to do anything to the Beatles music without slivers of beauty jutting out here and there.
McLaughlin’s Beatles methy mix has been wedded to video excerpts from Bollywood and Lollywood films in addition to fragments of documentaries, experimental films, fractals and animation.
Geoffrey West: The surprising math of cities and corporations – YouTube: Physicist Geoffrey West has found that simple, mathematical laws govern the properties of cities — that wealth, crime rate, walking speed and many other aspects of a city can be deduced from a single number: the city's population. In this mind-bending talk from TEDGlobal he shows how it works and how similar laws hold for organisms and corporations.
"Moveable Type" Offers Letterpress Classes Out Of A Truck | Co. Design: Designer Kyle Durrie is bringing the joys of old-school graphic design to people across the country, one town at a time.
Online commenting: the age of rage | Technology | The Observer: The worldwide web has made critics of us all. But with commenters able to hide behind a cloak of anonymity, the blog and chatroom have become forums for hatred and bile
Citymodel-Musicmachine
(Youtube Direktcity, via Notcot)
Schöne Idee von Akko Goldenbeld, der ein Model der Stadt Eindhoven auf einem Zylinder gebaut hat, der wiederum mit kleinen Hämmern auf ein Piano haut. Etwas verkopft vielleicht und das Ergebnis ist praktisch unhörbar, aber sehr interessantes Konzept.
The tall buildings in the city centre have a heavy touch; the low-rise villas to the South create considerably gentler sounds. Akko Goldenbeld has a very personal way of looking at, or rather listening to the city.
He has created a scale model of Eindhoven and assigned it the role of sound recorder; the buildings create a score. Placed on a revolving wooden cylinder the buildings set little hammers in motion that play the keys of a piano. And turning and turning, the city makes its voice heard: from loud to soft, long to short, high-pitched to low, traslating the urban developers’three dimensional reality into an aural experience. Stadsmuziek (City Music) makes you tune in to the ensemble-playing that is environemental planning.
Elektrischer Reporter: Denkende Städte, verschwundene Anonymität und internationale Hedonisten
Schöner Start der dritten Staffel von Mario Sixtus’ Elektischem Reporter mit unter anderem Warren Ellis: Denkende Städte, verschwundene Anonymität und internationale Hedonisten.
DIGIsellschaft: Großkonzerne versprechen uns “Smart Cities”, “denkende Städte”, die ihre Bewohner wahrnehmen und ihnen dabei helfen, ihre Probleme zu lösen.
Uebermorgen.TV: Wie sähe das Web aus, wenn wir alle gezwungen wären uns dort auszuweisen, wenn es keinerlei Anonymität im Internet mehr gebe?
140sekunden: @josh_k_phisher: “Herrlich, die sind ganz verrückt darauf, daß man den größten Blödsinn ins Mikro spricht.“
Hypercities – Urban History on Googlemap-Timelines
(Youtube Direkthyper, via Brainpickings)
Hypercities, ein superfaszinierendes Projekt von Schülern und Studenten. Grundsätzlich ist es ein Googlemaps-Mashup mit historischen Karten und jeder Menge Zusatzinfos, Bildern und Videos. Wer nur ein bisschen was mit Geschichte, Kartographie und Städteplanung anfangen kann, wird Hypercities lieben. Alleine schon sensationell: Eine Karte von Kairo mit Tweets in Real Time während der ägyptischen Revolution auf einer Google Map. Bislang gibt es Timeline-Maps von unter anderem London, Shanghai, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Berlin, New York, Los Angeles und Mexico City.
Built on the idea that every past is a place, HyperCities is a digital research and educational platform for exploring, learning about, and interacting with the layered histories of city and global spaces. Developed though collaboration between UCLA and USC, the fundamental idea behind HyperCities is that all stories take place somewhere and sometime; they become meaningful when they interact and intersect with other stories. Using Google Maps and Google Earth, HyperCities essentially allows users to go back in time to create and explore the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment.
A HyperCity is a real city overlaid with a rich array of geo-temporal information, ranging from urban cartographies and media representations to family genealogies and the stories of the people and diverse communities who live and lived there.
Manchester, networked City
(Motherboard Direktmanchester)
Spannendes Video von Motherboard über das „FutureEverything festival“ in Manchester.
For their most recent conference, FutureEverything invited Motherboard to come play in Manchester, a city that is both an urban and digital sandpit. From found art in Google Street View to tracking anti-social behavior in your vicinity, to the simple act of “checking-in,” FutureEverything – and its founder Drew Hemment – shows that technology can be as sinister as it is enabling. But if the increasing presence of technologies in our everyday lives can lead to estrangement or control, they can also, as some of these technologists are demonstrating, create a whole new way of thinking about and remaking the city.
Tokyo Panorama Timelapse
(Vimeo Direkttokyo, via Digital Urban)
Schönes Timelapse-Video von Tokyo. Normalerweise verschmähe ich den ganzen Timelapsekram ja mittlerweile, been there, done that. Dieses Exemplar ist aber insgesamt so stimmig, dass es passt: Tolle Panorama-Shot und super Schnitt zu einem sehr schönen Soundtrack (Broadcast 2000 – Get up and go).
