YET MORE 2010 CENSUS LINKS

More NYC 2010 Census maps

Pols crying to the press after census numbers for 2010 are released

Topographies & Tales is about the relationship between people, language, identity and place, revealing personal stories against the larger picture of how our concept of space and environment is shaped by “belonging” and “nationhood”, and how boundaries, barriers and borders come to be formed.

"When I think of what holds back cities, I don't think about, say, the farm fields of Iowa or the shale gas regions of rural Pennsylvania and New York. What I do think of is suburbia, and the way U.S. cities have been structured for half a century around the car -- specifically, around moving people via private transportation pods through a web of low-density suburbs that surround cities, on publicly funded roads."

As a follow-up to my earlier compilation, “The Two Mayors,” here is the stunning conclusion to the story of @MayorEmanuel. He won the election and as predicted by Mayor Daley, vanished into a time vortex in order to save the multiverse.

I’ve also been boning up on my @MayorEmanuel backstory, and man, it is totally batshit in the best possible way. There are layers and layers to this thing that I couldn’t even guess at, and a few I’m probably still missing. In short, the anonymous author(s) of the thread have been building towards this science-fiction/comic-book resolution of the story for a while now, first planting the seeds months ago, then grinding them up like fine celery salt.

You can read a quick-and-dirty PDF of all of @MayorEmanuel’s tweets here, assembled by @najuu (h/t Carla Casilli). I’m not Storifying the whole thing, because 1) Twitter’s archives have a hard time going back that far in the Storify interface and 2) even if they did, I’m not stupid. But I would like to do my small part to gather the limbs of Osiris just here at the end. Enjoy.

[View the story “The Last Hours of @MayorEmanuel” on Storify]

Suicidator City Generator is a Python script for Blender.

With it, you can automatically create entire, three-dimensional modern cities in a matter of seconds by adjusting various parameters, such as city size and complexity, rather than creating each building, each street, and each texture manually.

In a study conducted in 1969, Donald Appleyard provided the first emperical evidence of the impact of traffic on neighborhood streets. In particular, he investigated 3 different streets in San Francisco that were chosen to be as identical as possible in every dimension except for one - the amount of traffic on each street. The study was able to show that just the mere presence of cars, with their implied aspects of danger, noise and pollution, crushes the quality of life in neighborhoods.

The streets of downtown Los Angeles have a different dream. They do not lead to the cardinal points of the compass but to the uncertain spaces in between. Ambiguity is written on our landscape.

In 2010, anyway, this is my own personal vision of informatic technology at the service of the full range of human desire and complexity. Not a word of it is intended as a “solution” to what are inevitably and correctly local social or political challenges…but it is intended to give people everywhere better tools with which to join such struggles.

Tech Missions
Technology evangelists and coaches could function as a mobile “genius bar,” going out to every neighborhood via exploration buses and provided technologically enabled training and support 24/7. This is an active campaign (or “mission”) to achieve the highest technology aptitude in the world. Tech evangelists are volunteers and part-time workers. Their services are available on a sliding scale; free to many, and supported by a $99-a-year membership fee for those who can afford it.

This is part four of a continuing brainstorm on the future of cities, inaugurated at the Velocity conference in September 2009. We’ll post a new idea each day until we run out, at which point we’re counting on you to come up with something smart. Do you have a good idea for improving your city? Add it in the comments below, or tweet it to @GOOD with hashtag #cityideas—we’ll publish the best ones. Monday’s idea: In-field Accreditation.

For those who couldn’t be there, and for those who were there and seek to savor the memories, here is An Event Apart Chicago, all wrapped up in a pretty bow:

AEA Chicago – official photo set
By John Morrison, subism studios llc. See also (and contribute to) An Event Apart Chicago 2009 Pool, a user group on Flickr.
A Feed Apart Chicago
Live tweeting from the show, captured forever and still being updated. Includes complete blow-by-blow from Whitney Hess.
Luke W’s Notes on the Show
Smart note-taking by Luke Wroblewski, design lead for Yahoo!, frequent AEA speaker, and author of Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks (Rosenfeld Media, 2008):

Jeffrey Zeldman: A Site Redesign
Jason Santa Maria: Thinking Small
Kristina Halvorson: Content First
Dan Brown: Concept Models -A Tool for Planning Websites
Whitney Hess: DIY UX -Give Your Users an Upgrade
Andy Clarke: Walls Come Tumbling Down
Eric Meyer: JavaScript Will Save Us All (not captured)
Aaron Gustafson: Using CSS3 Today with eCSStender (not captured)
Simon Willison: Building Things Fast
Luke Wroblewski: Web Form Design in Action (download slides)
Dan Rubin: Designing Virtual Realism
Dan Cederholm: Progressive Enrichment With CSS3 (not captured)
Three years of An Event Apart Presentations

Note: Comment posting here is a bit wonky at the moment. We are investigating the cause. Normal commenting has been restored. Thank you, Noel Jackson.

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