Urban Daily Life is my catalogue of images I systematically photographed in different places around the world. I have organized these in different categories like architecture, city elements, domestic details, materials, street culture and street elements. If you enter a category you will find sub categories like benches, statues, trees. You will find the collection on that topic captured in different cities, like housing. If you want to see the complete index on all the topics you can go to Abc of the city.

I've always been curious about the location where people (citizens or visitors) place the center of a city. You can define it as an area but also at specific points.

'Berman outfitted undergraduates at the University of Michigan with GPS receivers. Some of the students took a stroll in an arboretum, while others walked around the busy streets of downtown Ann Arbor. The subjects were then run through a battery of psychological tests. People who had walked through the city were in a worse mood and scored significantly lower on a test of attention and working memory, which involved repeating a series of numbers backwards. In fact, just glancing at a photograph of urban scenes led to measurable impairments, at least when compared with pictures of nature. "We see the picture of the busy street, and we automatically imagine what it's like to be there," says Berman. "And that's when your ability to pay attention starts to suffer."'

Cool Flickr group game.

Why can't you sit still? "For a million years we stalked elk, monkey, crab; we gathered nut, grub and leaf. We had to move to live. Then half a minute ago we stooped to sow seeds and the rest is history."

October 18 & 19, 2007.

Note the photography section, wow.

"The goal of the Urban Austin project is to give the residents of Austin a complete, continually-updated online reference source of what's being planned and built."

Annie Wolock shared this search tool at a2b3. Local business searches, confined to a rectangle or circle you draw over a map. Cool but useless toy (unless you've never used Google Earth).

"Remember Strider, in Lord of the Rings? They didn't call him Sneaker or Sprinter or Sworder, though he possessed these skills in abundance ... Not only could he could outpace his enemies, by his walking reconnaissance, he came to outknow them."

"You need to convince yourself that walking is not some last ditch compromise shadow exercise, but that it's profoundly ass kickingly exciting. That's where urban ranger comes in."

The original urban ranger essay/manifesto. "The question should be 'when shouldn't I walk?' Walking is the default activity. It's everything else that needs a justification."

"It's once again time for Ann Arbor's biennial budget process, and the news is bleak. If Ann Arbor's bringing up the rear of the pack [of cash-strapped Michigan cities], the pack's a lot tighter than I'd thought."

Jim Kunstler agenda for the world of tomorrow

This is a great idea.

Wifi puzzle game? "In the game, the player has to move through the city to search for access points. The access points are visualized on the PSP as basic geometrical figures (triangle, circle, square) with a specific color and sound."

"Gutenkarte is a geographic text browser, intended to help readers explore the spatial component of classic works of literature."

"...is a Collaborative Production Game. Players build characters by completing tasks for their groups and increasing their Score. The goals of play include meeting new people, exploring the city, and participating in non-consumer leisure activities."

I haven't played "Urban Dead" in months, but I'm amazed at the sophistication of tools and maps people keep making for it.

"Jane Jacobs, American-born Canadian writer/activist and author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), passed away this morning in Toronto."

"A Global Festival of Art on the Edge & the Thirteenth International Symposium of Electronic Art."

"Chongqing is the fastest-growing urban centre on the planet. Its population is already bigger than that of Peru or Iraq, with half a million more arriving every year in search of a better life."

Murph and Brandon, urban planning students of refined quality and excellent character, are working on a term project in Flint which has gotten press attention.

Series of interviews with people having moved out of Grand Rapids, MI. Cool cities indeed!

Jell-O San Francisco.

"This quaint page is a gallery of images of buildings and the stones of which they are built."

Blog posting archive for our recent trip.

"The interior design of the entire hotel is based on the book, 'Invisible Cities', by Italo Calvino. Each bedroom is representative of a different city (see below)."

"Future is waiting for us."

"More than half of all humans will soon be living in cities, according to a prediction by the United Nations."

I don't understand this yet. "Folksonomy" will help to save Detroit? (?? If all you have is a hammer...)

7 pixels = 1 km.

"The Architecture of Moscow from the 1930s to the early 1950s. Unrealised projects."