This .walk example shows the classic generative psychogeographical algorithm, that urban exploration haiku, written down like a pseudo-computer language .  

This is a journey through 12 modern ghettos starting in a refugee camp in Tanzania and ending in a forest in Patagonia. In each of these places, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin methodically documented their inhabitants, and asked them the same questions: How did you get here? Who is in power? Where do you go to be alone? To make love? To get your teeth fixed?

We argue that such data conveys ambient geospatial information, capturing for example, people’s references to locations that represent momentary social hotspots. In this paper we address a framework to harvest such ambient geospatial information, and resulting hybrid capabilities to analyze it to support situational awareness as it relates to human activities.

A proper editor would probably have added a two-thousand word preface explaining contemporary psychogeography as a battleground between radical nostalgia and defeatist politics of landscape, while defending it against the eros/anal/tantric obsessions of deep topographers, edge land romanticists and other brokers of psychogeographic derivatives. But fuck that!

Scaling and Allometry with respect to what happens when cities get bigger. The essential insight from Bettencourt and West and their other collaborators is that big cities generate more than proportionate returns to scale – positive allometry or superlinearity for things like creative industries, patents, incomes and so on

Skylounge has been specifically designed to engage with the London skyline offering spectacular views to the South Terrace over Tower Bridge, the historic Tower of London and the river Thames, and the Gherkin and St Pauls from the North Terrace.

Mapnificent shows you the area you can reach with public transport from any point in a given time. It is available for major cities in the US and world wide.

but first I want to play the what-if game. If we could put a cybercar in every garage, how would that change the rhythms and routines of daily life?

I want to experience the city as an Eskimo experiences the Arctic not as a programmer experiences buggy code.

The Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge distinguishes itself from earlier platooning demos (e.g. the PATH project) by having a completely heterogeneous mix of vehicles and systems built by multiple researcher and student teams.

The Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge distinguishes itself from earlier platooning demos (e.g. the PATH project) by having a completely heterogeneous mix of vehicles and systems built by multiple researcher and student teams.

Wanderlust (the making of) is a mobile story telling platform integrating with the cohort of Foursquare, making use of their massive database of check-ins. Via these location the narratives unfold. The clever concept of the Wandelust stories is, that they play at generic type locations instead of actual unique locations.

Utopia London is director Tom Cordell’s journey in film through the city he grew up in, meeting the architects who designed it, and reuniting them with the buildings they created. Explore this map to see how their work traces the recent history of the city.

it’s a delightfully analog, painstakingly curated tour of all the things that make the city a cross-cultural icon — from its rich culinary landscape to Brooklyn’s bookstores to the midday madness of Midtown to the peculiar cultures of different neighborhoods, ZG2NYC is a remarkable achievement of urban curiosity, beautifully illustrated with original artwork.

Dexplicit has noticed a change in production styles: "A lot of producers nowadays are building their tunes around a strong synth riff, as opposed to a distinctive bassline being the integral part of the song. Maybe this is a result of their audiences becoming more accustomed to mid-range music via their iPods? Or maybe they are just toning down the bass to get more radio airplay?"

A crowdsourced global directory of buildings

The theme for this year’s festival announces its theme for this year is Visionary Cities. Under this banner a number of live music and visual performances will take place, showcasing established names in electronic media as well as lesser-known talents from around the world.

Civic Center champions civic engagment through stories, services, products, and public installations.

He examines the transformation of Western militaries into high-tech urban counter-insurgency forces, the militarization and surveillance of March international borders, the labelling as “terrorist” of democratic dissent and Politics/Geography protests, and the enacting of legislation suspending “normal” civilian law

What we’re looking for are appearances of the networked digital in the physical, and vice versa: apertures through which the things that happen in the real world drive the “network weather,” and contexts in which that weather affects what people see, confront and are able to do.

ng edges are a mix of new developments that illustrate the variety of modern British architecture, and the outstanding architectural debate in the City which concerns the issue of tall buildings.
Walking tour, departing from City of London Information Centre, St Paul's Churchyard EC4M 8BX at 10am. £9.50/£7.

But it remains to be seen how well that momentum will keep up and how able to South African government is to maintain these sorts of investments in improvements to it urban realm.

500 books on an Asian theme are being released into the wild around Marylebone today. The books - which include The Buddha of Suburbia, Sushi and Beyond, Red Dust, The Boy with the Topknot and Dubai: The Story of the World's Fastest City - are being given away as part of the launch of the Festival of Asian Literature, which runs until 27th May

Our goal was to take advantage of this wealth of data and apply a little bit of science to the question. If there was anything that could plausibly affect one’s quality of life in a particular neighborhood, we tried to incorporate it

Cities are wonderful places, and everybody finds different things in them. Some of us like to take pictures of interesting, unusual, or beautiful things we see, but many of use are moving so fast through the urban landscape we don't take in the things around us.

New York Works is an audio portrait of a vanishing city. From a knife sharpener who still makes house calls to one of Brooklyn's last commercial fisherman, New York Works tells the stories of those who keep the city's past alive.

I’m excited that it’s now possible to wire up a city nervous system without any government or authority, just mass enthusiasm and participation.

101 cheap things to do now

the hashtag #LDNcyclist was setup and I wanted to go through some of the responses to see what people thought about London’s Cyclists

CCTV video signal receivers cached surveillance camera signals into public and private spaces and were made visible: surveillance became sousveillance. By making images visible which normally remain hidden, we gain access to the “surveillance from above” enabling us to use these images to create personal narratives of the city. The Images of Ebb Workshop will look at constructing a narrative to the Sounds of Ebb.

The aerial surveillance system features high-definition video recording technology that is capable of viewing people or objects

several miles away and whose images can later be magnified to identify the individuals, officials said.

"You never know when you are being watched or followed. It would be stupid to commit a crime. You see it with such detail," said Mayor R. Rex Parris, who took a ride last week in a camera-equipped airplane with pilot Dick Rutan.

My focus is encouraging the community of web professionals in and around Whitehall to network, self-organise, and collaborate together with one purpose in mind: improving how government conducts itself online

A Guardian Technology campaign for free public access to data about the UK and its citizens

Everyblock is a site that crawls local data sources, aggregates the data, and then surfaces them geographically. For instance I get an email everyday that alerts me to news, fire department activity, health notices and flickr photos taken within blocks of my house

Everyblock is a very impressive site that aggregates and geocodes local data -- news, crime, fire, restaraunt inspections and reviews - and then lets users define their interests down to the block-level.

What's really going on right now is much bigger than that. Open gov is a big part of the story, but not the whole story. On top of Open Gov, there are organizations like The Open Planning Project (TOPP), or Front Seat, or my own DIYcity, working alongside these open gov groups, trying to make the whole civic system work better.

Inside Out show which will take us deep into the beating heart of some of the UK’s great musical cities. The first episode of Inside Out UK 'London Belongs To Me' is a journey through the UK’s hallowed capital with dubstep pioneer and Digital Mystik Mala leading di way - from the South London home he grew up in to the record shops of his youth, via the mastering studios where some of the most influential dubstep plates have been cut. Along the way we meet his oldest friend and musical partner Coki and former Academy participant and collaborator Andreya Triana.

Marc and Sara go on to speak about different aspects of their nine year involvement as web-currators of the world-wide street art scene, and share a slide show packed with amazing pieces.

While encampments and street living have always been a part of the landscape in big cities like Los Angeles and New York, these new tent cities have taken root — or grown from smaller enclaves of the homeless as more people lose jobs and housing — in such disparate places as Nashville, Olympia, Wash., and St. Petersburg, Fla.

The SENSEable City Lab is a recent initiative; a new initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which focuses on studying how digital technologies are evolutionizing the way we live in cities. And, therefore, how we can leverage these technologies; how we can make use of it through understanding how cities are using it; how we can design better cities. And then we can create cities that are more sustainable, more livable and automatically more efficient.

Traditional communities still remember how to do a barn raising. Those of us who spend our time on the internet celebrate wikipedia, but most of us have forgotten how to do crowdsourcing in the physical world

The Slow Down London campaign will hold a festival (24 April – 4 May 2009) offering activities and inspiration, through working with a range of partners. It will give Londoners a chance to explore slow music and arts, to try meditation and yoga, to sample slow food and crafts, to discover 'slow travel' in our own city, to debate ideas about time and pace, and to find our own ways to challenge the cult of speed and to appreciate the world around us.

Our cities today are relics from a time before the Internet. Services and infrastructure, created and operated by the government, are centrally managed, non-participatory and closed. What is needed right now is a new type of city: a city that is like the Internet in its openness, participation, distributed nature and rapid, organic evolution - a city that is not centrally operated, but that is created, operated and improved upon by all - a DIY City.

despite the vagaries of the business, independent bookstores continue to open, and to serve as hubs for communities real and imagined.

all large cities resemble one another in a fundamental way. Walking around confirms what one already knows. Here’s where the rich live, here the poor. Here is where business is conducted and the expensive stores are to be found. And finally, here is the neighborhood where one goes to have a good time

hackers are building sensors, bots and software into everything around them bottom-up, fast, cheap and out-of-control. They're creating environments that react, adapt and respond to us - and perhaps more importantly - each other: The Demon-Haunted World. Matt's session will be a whistlestop tour of those days of future past and pointers to some practical futures we can start building right now, together.

a new project to inspire Londoners to improve their lives by slowing down to do things well. Slow Down London will hold a campaign and festival (24 April - 4 May 09), offering ideas and opportunities to help us challenge the cult of speed and appreciate the world around us.

there are quiet, peaceful spaces hiding within all the craziness of central London. Here's where to step out of the city and be still, when you're right in the middle of it all.

We live in one of the noisiest cities in the world - but you don't need to leave town to escape the cacophony. Just follow our guide to the city's oases of calm.

Our city is read-only. You’re free to read advertising, business signs, and city signs. But dare you write or hang anything of your own; you will be labeled as a criminal - a graffiti vandal. In many cities it’s even illegal to hang a sign for a garage sale on a light pole. If you happen to have a several thousand dollars, you might be able to say what you want - as long as it’s not too political.

But this is public space. You’re free to say whatever you want in public space, but freedom of speech does not extend to the visual environment. The visual environment is pay to play. Public visual space has become commercial space.

A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to constantly redirect our attention so that we aren't distracted by irrelevant things, like a flashing neon sign or the cellphone conversation of a nearby passenger on the bus. This sort of controlled perception -- we are telling the mind what to pay attention to -- takes energy and effort. The mind is like a powerful supercomputer, but the act of paying attention consumes much of its processing power.

Natural settings, in contrast, don't require the same amount of cognitive effort. This idea is known as attention restoration theory, or ART

A couple of years ago I had the idea that it might be fun to take photos of London without humans - yes, I was motivated by that scene in Westminster from 28 Days Later. Unfortunately, not being a film director I was not really in the position to have half of London sealed off for photos - but realised that on Xmas morning there could be an opportunity.

Helen Zille, Executive Mayor of Cape Town and leader of South Africa’s opposition Democratic Alliance, has been awarded the 2008 World Mayor Prize

Thanks to global interdependence, state-against-state warfare is far less likely than it used to be, and viable only against disconnected or powerless states. But the underlying processes of globalization have made us exceedingly vulnerable to nonstate enemies. The mechanisms of power and control that states once exerted will continue to weaken as global interconnectivity increases

This Japanese Roof Garden, on the other hand, looks stunning all year round thanks to a sturdy emphasis on mineral over animal and vegetable.

Peter Gibson (aka Roadsworth) began painting the streets of Montreal in the fall of 2001. He was motivated by a desire for more bike paths in the city and a questioning of “car culture” in general.

the latest video from Arup that suggests how embedded networks of tags and sensors will allow cities to monitor themselves and improve efficiencies - particularly in the reduction of their environmental footprints.

Now Sao Paulo is creating a registry of street art to be preserved, exempt from Mayor Gilberto Kassab's drive to eliminate ``visual pollution.'' The episode is sparking a public discussion of what constitutes art.

As luxury condos sprout up in the Alphabet City neighborhood Bird once called home, artists have been fleeing to find cheaper rents and more room for artistic expression.“None of us really can afford or even want to live in Manhattan,”

What interests me here is not the obvious fact that bad traffic might cause tempers to flare, but the idea that people might develop historically unique psychiatric conditions because of a work of public infrastructure under construction somewhere in their city.

You live in the big here. Wherever you live, your tiny spot is deeply intertwined within a larger place, imbedded fractal-like into a whole system called a watershed, which is itself integrated with other watersheds into a tightly interdependent biome. (See the world eco-region map ). At the ultimate level, your home is a cell in an organism called a planet. All these levels interconnect. What do you know about the dynamics of this larger system around you? Most of us are ignorant of this matrix. But it is the biggest interactive game there is. Hacking it is both fun and vital.

these interventions have functioned in my life exactly as I believe they were intended to: they expanded and refined my perceptions, helped me look at the world around me in a different light, and even occasionally urged me to one or another practical decision about the way I wanted to live my life.

While I have doubts about New York continuing into the 21st century as a genuine creative force, it’s a credit to the city that Rupture bases himself there. However, his work is more informed by time spent travelling through several so-called liminal zones - the immigrant-rich spaces of Barcelona and Brussels amongst others - where local culture is a complex hybridised cocido.

Our pledge states we do not want or need a corporate chain restaurant like Nando's in Stoke Newington Church Street.

Do other cities use classical music in this way, in the UK or around the world? Is this insidious social brainwashing or just a part of music in everyday life? And what's the strangest place you've encountered your favourite music playing in public?

simple and efficient instrument to strengthen urban creative initiatives by reusing abandoned buildings as workspaces. PRECARE facilitates the 'intermediary use' of abandoned buildings

How are our experience of the city and the choices we make in it affected by mobile communications, pervasive media, ambient informatics, and other “situated” technologies?

the overall impression I was left with was that the future so many of us have been talking about for so long has all of a sudden arrived in the form of a live, running, working application.

contrast between Edward and George's childhoods was highlighted in a report which warns that the mental health of 21st-century children is at risk because they are missing out on the exposure to the natural world enjoyed by past generations.

The maps, which cover 23 urban areas in England, show the level of environmental noise from industries, airports, road and rail networks over 24-hour periods or during the night.

His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

i'm soo going to do this!

note that many of these steps use the approach of open source insurgency and even uses the rule of five. Here are the steps:

Detroit techno is the sound of the city. Not of city people, but the city itself. The humans, if they are still alive at all, have been coopted entirely by the urban machine, absorbed into its processes, their bodies disciplined by its unforgiving rhythms

The urban battle space is a system. One can understand cities as a set of interrelated elements interacting as whole cities interdependent with the environment- cities are not islands.

preserving an urban community—not merely its architecture, its open space, or its independently owned stores—now means recognizing what the local is made of, the warp and weft of all its pieces, wherever they come from, near or far. And that requires

Pentagon correspondent Nick Turse spent time behind the closed doors of a Pentagon-approved conference that had in mind nothing less than planning weaponry, strategy, and policy for the next hundred years

'Visual aesthetics are a major part of the planning system with strong guidelines determining what is acceptable or unacceptable. A corresponding aesthetics of sound is missing.'