Sanitation!

The competition is on! Make Sanitation Sexy.
The Search for the Obvious is a great site acknowledging our built environment.

"We believe in the power of creativity to better the world. Instead of seeing problems, a creative mind sees obvious solutions. Look around you and you'll find all sorts of solutions to problems that once seemed impossible. Now Acumen Fund needs YOU to help change how the world is addressing poverty by showing that there's a better way."

Google mania

Sorry, but too great not to share or to forget:

10 Simple Google Search Tricks

Google Public Data

Great new access to data and mapping.
Leave it to Google:
"Data visualizations for a changing world: The Google Public Data Explorer makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate. As the charts and maps animate over time, the changes in the world become easier to understand. You don't have to be a data expert to navigate between different views, make your own comparisons, and share your findings."

Taxi Mapping

Another great New York Times info-mapping of Taxi's in the city

City of Information

The City of Information

"Wikipedia may be the closest thing to a metropolis yet seen online."

taken from: Wikipedia - Exploring Fact City, by Noam Cohen for the NYTimes

"...Like a city, Wikipedia is greater than the sum of its parts; for example, the random encounters there are often more compelling than the articles themselves. The search for information resembles a walk through an overbuilt quarter of an ancient capital. You circle around topics on a path that appears to be shifting. Ultimately the journey ends and you are not sure how you got there..."

EXYZT Presents Situation Room

Storefront for Art and Architecture
EXYZT presents Situation Room
Feb 20 2009 - Mar 31 2009

" The architecture .../... will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space... It will be a means of knowledge and a means of actions."
Gilles Ivain alias Ivan Chtcheglov, 1958

We will act to defend architecture that is plural, used, complex, diverse, real and alive; architecture that is about action and interaction, formation and deformation, transormation and appropriation.

Situation Room as playground for [re] creation, collective action, active occupation, open demonstration, and social games will be intuitive, interactive and collective performance, showing an everyday life tools and knowledge Directory. For architecture of process, of fabrication, reaction and interaction, members of Exyzt will inhabit the gallery space, making use of the furnishings as though it were a domestic space.

More than showing past projects, we choose to set up a platform for creation and solidarity inviting people to transform the classic use of the gallery, to experiment diversity of programs and activities with basic cheap materials as moving boxes activated with the Storefront staff.

We propose a platform for action, defending an architecture that is alive. EXYZT shakes up the idea of architecture as an independent field. Working on experimental projects, EXYZT invites architecture, video, graphic-design, botany and any other concept to become devices of expression and creation.

Like a series of disparate notes, ready-to-assemble elements will be put together in situ to create this modular, domestic place, rapidly assembled viral constructions that can be implemented to create and augment a social space. Little by little, each limb of this strange apartment will grow new functions, allowing its users to do more and more things, to occupy and work in its ever-changing space. After the basic living space has been assembled an essential urban infrastructure will be added: water, electricity, radio, TV, Internet, etc... Once complete, a vast variety of individual modules will occupy the gallery space to be used for a moment, a day, or a whole night. Lightness, speed and flexibility will be essential ingredients of the Set-up.

The collective carries out temporary setups. Each project is in line with precise and determined time and special frame. The units can be shaped and rearranged to become a living and sitting space, a workspace equipped with a desk, computers and tools, or a dining room, among other forms. From week to week the space will evolve, taking on different ephemeral forms and functions with the public. The situation becomes the physical medium through which a creative and collective game is expressed. The series of projects questions the relationship between public and private and encourages the audience to move from being a spectator to be an actor too.

Exyzt invites the audience to reconsider occupied areas in a well-defined time-frame. The collective conceive and organize each project as a ludic playground where cultural behaviours and shared stories relate, mix and mingle.

Created in 2003 on the initiative of five architects, they produced and organized a first self-construction and self-documented project on a abandoned plot of land in Parc de la Villette, in Paris. By opening up to various fields, the collective group attempts to render architecture into a different perspective.

Our team is now a community of people who have chosen to act under the same principle of sharing knowledge and abilities, imagining the environment as the terrain of a participatory game, a site for play and appropriation, creating 'transient micro ambiances' as Guy Debord described the constucted situation.

Construction will constitute the first movement. Act!

Text by Philippe Rizzotti & Dimitri Messu

Chicago's New Loops of Security

Chicago Links Street Cameras to Its 911 Network
By Karen Ann Cullotta

“We can now immediately take a look at the crime scene if the 911 caller is in a location within 150 feet of one of our surveillance cameras, even before the first responders arrive,” Mr. Orozco said...

“...In America, we protest the use of cameras for things like enforcing laws that reduce crime or traffic accidents, but we probably ought to do more,” Mr. Alschuler said.

He added: “My more serious concern would be if they start using new audio technologies, which can be calibrated to alert police to loud noises, like a scream or a car crash. What worries me is if police can use technology to listen to anyone who happens to be talking in a public location, which would raise serious privacy concerns...”

Gated Internet Communities?

photo and related NYTimes article

“If you’re looking for a digital Pearl Harbor, we now have the Japanese ships streaming toward us on the horizon,” Rick Wesson, the chief executive of Support Intelligence, a computer consulting firm, said recently."

The internet is under attack. The existing structure of the internet has security gaps, allowing hackers to infiltrate corporate and military data...causing much fear. So the debate ranges now in creating a new internet, one with stricter identification measures and security blocks.

"What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a “gated community” where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety. Today that is already the case for many corporate and government Internet users. As a new and more secure network becomes widely adopted, the current Internet might end up as the bad neighborhood of cyberspace. You would enter at your own risk and keep an eye over your shoulder while you were there."

"The idea is to build a new Internet with improved security and the capabilities to support a new generation of not-yet-invented Internet applications, as well as to do some things the current Internet does poorly — such as supporting mobile users."

Or does the strategy look not at recreating the web, but instead rethinking the structure and gradually creating new interventions...

"That has not discouraged the Stanford engineers who say they are on a mission to “reinvent the Internet.” They argue that their new strategy is intended to allow new ideas to emerge in an evolutionary fashion, making it possible to move data traffic seamlessly to a new networking world. Like the existing Internet, the new network will almost certainly have no one central point of control and no one organization will run it. It is most likely to emerge as new hardware and software are built in to the router computers that run today’s network and are adopted as Internet standards."

How does the structure of our information relate to the physical built environments. Are the gated communities of suburbia, the super surveillant cities of post 9/11 the future of our communication networks?

"A more secure network is one that would almost certainly offer less anonymity and privacy. That is likely to be the great tradeoff for the designers of the next Internet. One idea, for example, would be to require the equivalent of drivers’ licenses to permit someone to connect to a public computer network. But that runs against the deeply held libertarian ethos of the Internet."

“As soon as you start dealing with the public Internet, the whole notion of trust becomes a quagmire,” said Stefan Savage, an expert on computer security at the University of California, San Diego."

bigger citys, bigger forests

New Jungles Prompt a Debate on Rain Forests
New York Times Article by Elisabeth Rosenthal

With over half of the world's population now living in cities, will the jungles be saved?
This interesting article discusses the issue of how farmers are leaving their deforested agricultural plots and heading to the cities, allowing the jungles to return.

Rosenthal states: "By one estimate, for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster."

Google's Power Meter

Kicking the smart grid into motion perhaps is the doing of Google, which introduced new software service online that helps homeowners track their energy use. This requires additional hardware that would plug into your main circuit breaker and would "talk" with your computer, downloading your energy patterns. The Google platform would then map it, graphically showing your energy use...thus prompting many to limit and adjust their use...saving money and surges on our energy grid. Google foresees implementing this into a social network interface...your daily energy use on facebook anyone?


related articles:
New York Times
Bits

Urban Omnibus

new urban forum/blog/newsletter

http://urbanomnibus.net/features-forum/

label it like it really is

Where it goes, not what it is....

Smart Bus Stops

This bus stop shelter in San Francisco offers the rider detailed information on where they are and how long they will be standing there for the next bus to arrive.

visualized information...efficiency, safety....all aspects promoting the use of public transportation.

what other means of informing users of public infrastructures be communicated?
mobile devices, light displays, audio, spatial?

A City Drip System

urban sewer grates along the streets of San Francisco color coded with drops of altering primary colored paints.

Graffiti artists or City employee? Physical demarcations noting status of rainwater catchment system?

What are the physical or virtual notifications of the efficiencies of a network?

Street Signs

Pedestrian street signs...
know where you are - without needing to be in a car.

Street corners have the street names stamped into the concrete, allowing for the pedestrian (already simi-conscious of what is before them) to be a little bit more aware of their location
San Francisco, California

Tracing our Clicks

By monitoring what we google online, can we actually get a better sense of the what the general public are thinking, experiencing and doing?

Leave it to Google itself to find that out. Google Flu Trends for example, within this report taking data from the past four years to show that by identifying key search terms, Google Flu Trends can call a flu outbreak up to 10 days before the CDC an identify it.

From their site:

"Each week, millions of users around the world search for online health information. As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer. You can explore all of these phenomena using Google Trends. But can search query trends provide an accurate, reliable model of real-world phenomena?"

..."real-world phenomena"...

How are our individual actions both virtually and physically understood within a collective?
What kind of "thinking" are we entering into a www database?
What kind of "thinking" could we begin entering into a www database to improve other social, cultural, economic functions?
What is a truly transparent city that can quantify satisfactions? dissatisfactions? qualifications?

image credit: google.org
additional article: new york times