Tags: urban

Mapping a World of Cities

A timeline of city maps, from 1524 to 1930.

The City — Lori Nix / Kathleen Gerber

Tiny ruins.

Free Movie of the Week

While we’re all confined to quarters during The Situation, Gary Hustwit is offering one of his films for free every week. The fantastic Helvetica is just about to finish its run, but every one of Gary’s films is worth watching (and rewatching): Helvetica, Objectified, Urbanized, and Rams.

Filmmaker Gary Hustwit is streaming his documentaries free worldwide during the global COVID crisis. Each week we’ll be posting another film here. We hope you enjoy them, and please stay strong.

Le Corbusier: How A Utopic Vision Became Pathological In Practice | Orange Ticker

Through planning and architectural design, Le Corbusier hoped to create a scientifically rational and comprehensive solution to urban problems in a way that would both promote democracy and quality of life. For him, the factory production process applied to high-rise buildings with prefabricated and standardized components is the most modern and egalitarian of urban forms.

Something something top-down design systems.

Google Maps Hacks, Performance and Installation, 2020 By Simon Weckert

I can’t decide if this is industrial sabotage or political protest. Either way, I like it.

99 second hand smartphones are transported in a handcart to generate virtual traffic jam in Google Maps.Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route to avoid being stuck in traffic

Draw all roads in a city at once

A lovely little bit of urban cartography.

A Walk In Hong Kong (Idle Words)

Maciej goes marching.

The protests are intentionally decentralized, using a jury-rigged combination of a popular message board, the group chat app Telegram, and in-person huddles at the protests.

This sounds like it shouldn’t possibly work, but the protesters are too young to know that it can’t work, so it works.

Atlas of Urban Expansion

Oodles and oodles of data on cities, including gorgeous animations of urban growth over time.

Barely Maps

Minimalist cartography.

Folding Beijing - Uncanny Magazine

The terrific Hugo-winning short story about inequality, urban planning, and automation, written by Hao Jinfang and translated by Ken Liu (who translated The Three Body Problem series).

Hao Jinfang also wrote this essay about the story:

I’ve been troubled by inequality for a long time. When I majored in physics as an undergraduate, I once stared at the distribution curve for American household income that showed profound inequality, and tried to fit the data against black-body distribution or Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution. I wanted to know how such a curve came about, and whether it implied some kind of universality: something as natural as particle energy distribution functions, so natural it led to despair.

Medieval Fantasy City Generator by watabou

Procedurally generated medieval town plans. Pick a size and then have some fun with the “warp” option.

The Hipster Index: Brighton Pips Portland to Global Top Spot

Take that, Portland!

In what is quite likely the greatest, most poetic showdown since the Thrilla in Manila, Brighton and Hove of the United Kingdom beat Portland of the USA by one-thousandth of a point. Portland scored 8.1631, Brighton scored 8.1632. No really. Brighton is scientifically the most hipster city in the world. Just.

Metropolis Now - The Atlantic

A collection of essays on cities and technology. Contributors include Bruce Sterling, James Bridle, and Adam Greenfield.

Google Maps’s Moat

A fascinating bit of cartographic reverse engineering, looking at how Google has an incredible level of satellite-delivered building detail that then goes into solving the design problem of marking “commercial corridors” (or Areas Of Interest) on their maps.

Infinitown | A WebGL Experiment by Little Workshop

I reckon this could be the canonical WebGL demo.

And if I’m reading dev tools right, this is all done in 86K.

Patterns Day 2017: Paul Lloyd on Vimeo

Paul pulls no punches in this rousing talk from Patterns Day.

The transcript is on his site.

Berlin Typography – Text and the City // Buchstaben und die Stadt

A blog dedicated to documenting the letterforms on display in Berlin.

Fantasies of the Future / Paul Robert Lloyd

Paul has published the slides and transcript of his knock-out talk at Patterns Day. This a must-read: superb stuff!

Design systems are an attempt to add a layer of logic and reasoning over a series decisions made by complex, irrational, emotional human beings. As such, they are subject to individual perspectives, biases, and aspirations.

How does the culture in which they are made effect the resulting design?

Designing Systems, Part 3: Components and Composition / Paul Robert Lloyd

Paul finishes up his excellent three part series by getting down to the brass tacks of designing and building components on the web …and in cities. His closing provocation has echoes of Heydon’s rallying cry.

If you missed the other parts of this series, they are:

1. Theory, Practice, and the Unfortunate In-between,
2. Layers of Longevity, and
3. Components and Composition

Designing Systems: Theory, Practice, and the Unfortunate In-between / Paul Robert Lloyd

Paul is turning his excellent talk on design systems into a three part series. Here’s part one, looking at urban planning from Brasília to London.