A little misleading as regards the Japanese technological landscape, but still important.

Montreal guy rips into the city's new bus shelters, mostly over issues that seem highly relevant to NYC's current CEMUSA/Grimshaw collection.

Integrating the universal mode into mobility planning.

"Aims to improve," that is, through specific, concrete interventions, like extending crossing signal times. The city is here for [everybody] to use.

Cassim did a great job of editing my two 1,500-word texts into a single 1,000-word piece. The essential points are intact; the voice is mostly preserved. Enjoy.

Supernice. Somewhere Holly Whyte is smiling.

Very clean, very nice, still short of the mark.

A nicely-shot look at the upgrading of transit provisions on lower Broadway.

Still the gold standard for rigorous photodocumentation of the urban landscape.

Me too.

Concretized desire lines, walking through walls, and like that...Chicago style.

(Further to the previous.)

CJ Wells came to our Systems/Layers walkshop in Wellington and blogged this *awesome* writeup. So, so stoked. (See map at http://is.gd/bHfNa)

Wow. Wow. They're on a tear over there, aren't they?

I remain in awe of Janette Sadik-Khan. This is wonderful.

From my comments: What if there was no Point B? See also http://flaneursociety.org/guide.pdf

The "NYC Stoop Bench" is absolutely lovely.

Unusually clear and bullshit-free thinking about the whats and whys of urban media interfaces, from Teppo Kotirinta at Nordkapp.

If you couldn't make it to Wellington, this video will go some way toward capturing the flavor and texture of our walkshop. Thanks so much to Nigel for filming it!

I'd be worried about the birds, myself, but these are lovely.

Jackpot link. "Click on any building to learn more about it." So beautifully done.

Top-notch work.

Fiat nox.

Absolutely incredible series in which a film location scout revisits the locations in Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) and compares across time. This was the New York I remember from my childhood: so much more textured in many ways.

"Visions of networked urbanism tend to live in what Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell call a "proximate future," that just-over-the-horizon window of time that never actually seems to arrive. But how do networked services inform our choices and experiences in the real city that we actually inhabit at this moment?" The "feet-on" workshop I'll be offering at Webstock in NZ next February. Do please join us.

More on Bus-Tops. I don't particularly care for the ho-hum, abuse-magnet way they've got this set up, but combined with Foursquare logic it might get interesting. (Become the mayor of your bus stop!)

Notes toward an art project placing networked LED panels in London bus shelters.

Via Eric. Comment: "And what if in that picture you were standing with someone or near some one that your partner doesn’t like….and then your partner beats you up for it. That’s the tenderloin. That stuff happens. You cant just take someones picture there and post it up. In the “language of the tenderloin” it means something to stand on golden gate and leavenworth or on turk and polk, those blocks mean certain things, where you can find certain people and where you can buy certain things. You take a picture of someone standing on a certain block, you are saying something about that person."

Lovely.

If you happen to be in NYC or London next week, there's an imperial god-tonne of amazing stuff going on. I dumped all my links in one post for easy reference. Enjoy!

Nice image of mixed conventions (Web, airport) in address signage.

Sorkin, via Danzico.

How about a cool, delicious Smirnoff Ice™, John Anderton?

I'm not always a fan of traffic calming, but this feels like several steps in the right direction to me.

Outstanding! Chang in the Times! Great work, too; triple hooah.

I've been seeing these for years, suspected there had to be some organizing involved, didn't know who or what or how...

Via Jones.

Part of the nicely-resolved Solar Street program, an integrated collection of lamps, bus stops, service kiosks and other street furniture. Intended to harvest solar gain, return excess watts to the grid - you know the drill.

Rambles a bit, and therefore sounds *just* like the mini-essays I used to write for Urban Computing.

Pretty enough, I suppose, but lower-capacity than the extant racks. And a single point of failure to their two. PROVISIONAL FAIL, sorry.

This is important and, I believe, true - but happily, very far from irreversible.

The seam between ubicomp and homelessness, very provocative.

Great. Now if someone could explain to me just what this so-called "New York City model" actually is...

Interventions in the streetscape that *don't* require permission from upstate.

Modeling the behavior of crowds, or: computational fluid dynamics as applied to particles and people. Via migurski.

Yeah buddy.

Great stuff. I like the voice.

Timid and partial, but a concrete step in the right direction (no pun intended)

While I was in Amsterdam, a little bit of Amsterdam came to NYC!

See also http://liftlab.com/think/nova/2006/09/17/anti-skateboard-devices-on-the-embarcadero/

"Imagine designing a system, a city - of engineered environments *and inhabitants*." Not so crazy about being an engineered anything, but sure does look rad.

What do you think? Wanna come talk infra?

Pinch me, I'm dreaming. Can we have this on Second Ave?

"Magna civitas, magna solitudo." Qualitatively, the experience of aloneness in the city may even improve on that of the rural variety.

Reasonably elegant, but, uh...not much room for digital interventions.

Poignantly, NYC is losing its status as America's walking capital. Notes the culprit is Atlanta-style suburbanization - oh boy do I agree. Keep New York New York!