12 posts tagged with urban and London.
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The Crane River
The
Crane River winds gently through West London, from the vast concrete bulk of Twickenham Rugby Stadium, past the
shot tower that is the last remnant of the vast gunpowder factory that lasted from 1776 to 1927 (blowing up 55 times), to the sunken Feltham Circles which are one of the few open graffiti walls in London. If you're lucky on your walk you can see seven species of bats, water voles, kingfishers, adders and eels, tawny owls and glow worms or Muntjac deer.
The 33 Coolest Streets in the World, according to TimeOut respondents
Street life is what makes the places we live feel alive. From grand avenues and shopping strips to pedestrianised backstreets and leafy squares, these streets are manageable microcosms of the world’s most exciting cities – each one chock-full of independent businesses, creative humans and everything else that makes urban life brilliant. Ready to take a stroll?
TimeOut asked more than 20,000 people the question: what’s the coolest street in your city?
"Perhaps city criticism should be recognized as distinct and necessary"
"Given how long we’ve relied on the work of critics on film, music, food, and much else besides, as well as the ever-increasing relevance of cities in our lives, it’s time we recognised city criticism as its own distinct category of writing. But what is city criticism — or rather, what isn’t it?" 'A way of learning from everything': the rise of the city critic. [more inside]
The Real Estate State
CAPITAL CITY: “Planners provide a window into the practical dynamics of urban change: the way the state both uses and is used by organized capital, and the power of landlords and developers at every level of government." Antifada Podcast: The Housing Monster w/ Samuel Stein of Capital City on the Real Estate State (89:00) 'Places where real estate is cheap don’t have many good jobs. Places with lots of jobs, primarily coastal cities, have seen their real-estate markets go absolutely haywire. " Why Housing Policy Feels Like Generational Warfare (The Atlantic) Grim New Report Shows Rent Is Unaffordable In Every State (Huffpost) Tenants Won This Round: Last week, New York tenants overcame the state's powerful real-estate lobby to win a historic package of renter protections. Next stop: universal rent control. (Jacobin) Berlin backs five-year rent freeze amid housing pressure (BBC) Lessons from Berlin (RTE)
Evil! -- one seemed to see it everywhere
This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a bronchial spasm. That is, at least, according to William Delisle Hay’s 1880 novella The Doom of the Great City. It imagines the entire population of London choked to death under a soot-filled fog. The story is told by the event’s lone survivor sixty years later as he recalls “the greatest calamity that perhaps this earth has ever witnessed” at what was, for Hay’s first readers, the distant future date of 1942. -- Brett Beasley in the Public Domain review on one of the first modern urban apocalypse stories.
The New Recreation Frontier?
Lets Swim To Work! "Centuries of boat traffic, heavy industry, sewage runoff and toxic dumping have ingrained in us the idea that urban waterways are not places for people. Even as cities have rushed to the water’s edge over the past couple of decades, building elaborate waterfront parks and esplanades, few have taken the next logical step: encouraging residents to dive in." [more inside]
The App of Life
"Thanks largely to smartphones, this is probably the best time ever to live in a packed city... Steve Jobs was a lifelong suburbanite, but it turns out he perfected the city." [google cache for those getting a log-in page.]
Where cabs and omnibuses are ruthlessly driven against them
In the frantic pace of modern life, it is often easy to forget what life was once like for those who built the world we now live in.
More from Bishopsgate library here and the Institute itself is worth a poke around
Making trails through the Mail Rail
Urban explorers surreptitiously gain access to the Post Office Railway underneath London, take lots of photos.
Short urban exploration documentaries
Uneven Terrain is a series of short documentaries about urban exploration, about 10-15 minutes long each. There are six so far, about monumental ruins in New York, Centralia, the Pennsylvania town where an underground coalseam has been on fire since the 1960s, abandoned missile silos in the US and how they're being turned into homes, oil drilling in Los Angeles, the Teufelberg listening station and the abandoned bunkers under Tempelhof Airport in Berlin and pirate radio in London and on the old Redsand sea forts. Each short doc has a different presenter. All have accompanying photo galleries. [These are produced for the bootmaker Palladium, but it's pretty low-key]
Picture London without Londoners
Abandoned London is a Flickr set by photographer IanVisits of London on Christmas morning when the city is (almost) denuded of people. Very disorienting if you've been to London (or any major city, really). I got this via William Gibson's blog and I'll let him describe it in his inimitable way: "Christmas, particularly in the early morning, has always seemed so much more liminal to me than New Year's eve. Spectral, deeply in-between [...] something about the way in which traffic, pedestrian and vehicular, controls one's depth of field, fragmenting and animating the experience."
Holmes' and Watson's World
One minute and four seconds in London, 1904. Birkbeck College professor Ian Christie rediscovered this footage in an archive in Canberra, shot for a travelogue by film pioneer Charles Urban.
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