Center for Future Studies | Home. How Citizen Mapmakers are Changing the Story of our Cities. By Christine McLaren - resident blogger for the BMW Guggenheim Lab, a mobile think tank investigating solutions to urban problems. It launched this fall in New York and will travel next to Berlin, Mumbai, and six other cities over six years. We see them every day, popping up on our Twitter feeds, filtered through blogs, or even scattered throughout the New York Times: maps portraying not the usual locations or destinations, but data. From people’s kisses in Toronto, to the concentration of pizza joints in New York, to the number of women who ride bikes, to the likelihood of being killed by a car in any given American city, the list of lenses through which we can now view our cities and neighborhoods goes on, thanks to data-mapping geeks. “The map user has now become the map creator,” is how Fraser Taylor put it to me in an interview. But even more importantly, Taylor says, we are also mapping new things—intangibles like social phenomena, feelings, impacts, and more.
منشية ناصر - تنمية مستدامة. Museums strive to make their ‘brands’ more relevant. Published: Sunday, Jan. 15, 2012 Its mission lies in preserving the past. But a museum's brand can be the key to its future. Branding -- the fostering of intimacy between product and consumer -- has become as important to museums as it is to car companies or sports teams. Time was, museums were visual lectures where the public could learn about Impressionist paintings, Bronze Age relics or the way a Tyrannosaurus Rex may have hunted its prey. "Branding isn't just the ad you put in the paper or your logo," says Judy Ross, director of marketing and information technology for the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg. Even such a formidable eminence as the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C, discovered that it couldn't rely on its venerable 165-year-old pedigree to draw new generations through its doors.
The Smithsonian's new slogan, "Seriously Amazing," is part of a campaign to recalibrate its image. "We still find it effective today," Armstrong says. Cairo's over-congestion vexes urban planners | Al-Masry Al-Youm: Today's News from Egypt. “The Contested Road to Khufu: Why the proposed new road wouldn’t solve any of the problems it claims to « CairoFromBelow. One element of the Cairo 2050 document is the creation of a wide boulevard from the Sphinx square to the area of the Giza Pyramids.
The project proposes the extension of the Arab League Road by 6 km and a 540 m wide roadway and redevelopment zone which would include high-end hotels and offices in the space currently occupied by over 220,00 residents and small businesses. Khufu Avenue’s construction would require leveling of large areas of the of the Buulaq el Dukrur region – an area with one of the highest densities in Cairo – among other neighborhoods in its way, consequently causing significant displacement and segregation of informal areas from business and tourist areas.
There is currently no credible relocation plan for the residents who will be forced to leave. Many of the affected residents have lived in their homes for generations and depend on the social cohesion of their community for employment opportunities. Like this: Like Loading... Heritage | The Mouseion revisited. Grappling with a Congested Cairo: « CairoFromBelow. Cairo is a city saturated with traffic. Weekday mornings are a frustrating, lengthy journey of inching down roads and through smoggy intersections. A constant reminder of the poor planning practices, the congestion of Cairo is almost unbearable, and, according to author David Sims, it is not at even near its climax. While many urban planners point to population density as the root of the congestion problem, Dr..Dina Shehayeb, professor at Egypt’s Housing and Building Research Center, argues that inappropriate zoning laws are to blame.
In a recent article published in Al-Masry Al-Youm, Dr. Shehayeb explains that until the late 1980s, Cairo’s neighborhoods had a variety of zoning laws meant to preserve existing housing and urban layout. In the early 1990’s, the government repealed such laws, deeming them unconstitutional, and buildings skyrocketed in response, as private investors tried to maximize profit. Government officials engaging in land speculation. Like this: Like Loading...