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These Pretty City Maps Were Drawn By Our Paths Through Them. It’s no secret that tourists love to snap pictures on the Staten Island ferry. Or that photographers will wander the side streets of east London capturing the latest street art. Everyone knows that Paris’s visitor-friendly arrondissements are flooded with selfie sticks on weekends. Now, a new visualization of more than a decade of Flickr photographs shows exactly what paths photographers make when taking pictures. Mapbox, the Washington, D.C. Pan and zoom on this interactive map of New York City's Flickr data, and press "Next" to see other cities: Eric Fischer, the artist and mapping expert behind the project, told Fast Company that he only downloaded metadata associated with images rather than the images themselves. "A map like this pushes limits in a lot of ways," he added.

The visualizations were made by layering Flickr’s search API onto Mapbox's own internal mapping platform and crowdsourced mapping data from OpenStreetMap. PSFK presents the Future Of Cities. 7 Cities That Are Starting To Go Car-Free. After over a hundred years of living with cars, some cities are slowly starting to realize that the automobile doesn't make a lot of sense in the urban context. It isn't just the smog or the traffic deaths; in a city, cars aren't even a convenient way to get around. Traffic in London today moves slower than an average cyclist (or a horse-drawn carriage). Commuters in L.A. spend 90 hours a year stuck in traffic. A U.K. study found that drivers spend 106 days of their lives looking for parking spots.

Now a growing number of cities are getting rid of cars in certain neighborhoods through fines, better design, new apps, and, in the case of Milan, even paying commuters to leave their car parked at home and take the train instead. Unsurprisingly, the changes are happening fastest in European capitals that were designed hundreds or thousands of years before cars were ever built. Here are a handful of the leaders moving toward car-free neighborhoods.

Madrid Paris Chengdu Hamburg Helsinki Milan. 4 | 6 Major Design Trends Shaping City Life In 2015. Cities are the future. By one oft-cited statistic, 70% of the world's population will live in urban areas by 2050. But chances are, the cities of the future won't look quite like the places where we live today. It's up to designers—architects, urban planners, interior designers, and more—to ensure that the people-packed cities of the future are livable, prosperous, healthy places. We asked a handful of design experts how urban life is changing, and what life in cities will look like in the new year. They delved into how the design of housing, retail, food, transportation, and more are altering the experience of urban life in 2015. The Sharing Economy Will Apply To Housing, Too "As has been well documented, younger generations have for both economic and social reasons become accustomed to sharing cars, apartments when they travel, and other assets over which they prefer exchange to ownership," says Vishaan Chakrabarti, a partner at SHoP Architects and a professor at Columbia University.

This German Data Center Wants To Heat Your House With Its Servers. The data centers that power the Internet use more energy than the entire country of India. Most of that energy is lost as waste heat. That fact inspired an idea: Why not use a network of servers to heat homes? Cloud & Heat, a cloud infrastructure company in Germany, stores server cabinets in houses and apartment buildings.

While the servers crunch data, the excess heat is used to warm up the homes in the winter and provide hot water all year. The service has a second major benefit: a huge chunk of the energy used in data centers goes to air conditioning to keep the machines cool. When the servers are distributed in homes instead of a single building, the company can eliminate the need for cooling. That, in turn, saves money and makes the service cheaper for customers.

"We knew that there's a tremendous need for new server capacity," says Jens Struckmeier, a professor at the University of Hamburg who co-founded the company. [All images: via Cloud & Heat] Mapping New York's Vacant Lots, To Use Them To Create A More Vibrant City. “We’re living with ghosts,” says Paula Segal, executive and legal director at 596 Acres. She's talking about many of New York’s currently vacant lots. Originally cleared as part of "urban renewal" plans—demolition of neighborhoods deemed “slums” across the country from 1949 to 1974—the idea was to make them open spaces, but many were never developed. Rather, they were left as open wounds (most behind fences), concentrated in areas like the South Bronx, East Harlem and East New York: neighborhoods that, as Segal put it, “we know with our hearts are full of holes.

But then you realize; those holes are part of a plan.” Today, there is a clear correlation you can see as Segal toggles between two maps: Urban renewal plans can predict with a sad accuracy the locations of the city's current empty lots. Too many currently empty lots are “the scabs of urban renewal: places that were cleared for the New City that never arrived.” 596 Acres is a grassroots community land access nonprofit. 4 Whimsical Designs That Make City Life Just A Little Bit More Bearable. When Samantha Moore moved from Philadelphia to New York to attend the School of Visual Arts, she experienced a feeling she'd never really anticipated. Little frustrations—an inexplicable 10-minute delay on the subway, someone winning a cab over her, a million little invasions of personal space—began to take their toll.

They didn’t seem like coincidences. Together, they began to feel like the city was out to get her personally. New Yorkers know the feeling well. It’s the classic buildup of stress that pushes many to their breaking points. Check it out: 1. Moore decided to target frustrations on the C train, one of the most infamously stinky and uncomfortable lines in the city. “When we go on trips, road trips for example, the entire point is the journey. By making the ride less something to be endured and more to be enjoyed, Moore found that passengers had more engaging conversations in the cars. 2. 3. 4. Design Trust for Public Space. Francês cria modelo de casas pré-fabricadas que produzem 50% mais energia do que consomem. Philippe Starck é um designer francês mundialmente conhecido por seus produtos de decoração e utensílios domésticos. Mas seu trabalho também tem muita força na área de design de móveis.

Foi com esse expertise que ele desenvolveu uma série de casas pré-fabricadas de baixo consumo de energia, com uma estrutura feita de vidro e alumínio. O modelo é chamado de Montfort e é a segunda série de Starck de casas sob encomenda. Elas são produzidas em parceria com a Riko, um dos principais fabricantes europeus de construções de madeira pré-fabricadas.

A coleção foi chamada de PATH e é a sigla de “Prefabricated Accessible Technological Homes”, em português, “Casas pré-fabricadas tecnologicamente acessíveis”, e é composta por quatro tipos diferentes de residências, todos projetados para consumir um terço da energia de uma casa tradicional. Cada casa de dois andares produz 50% mais energia do que consome, em grande parte graças a uma variedade de “sistemas de eco-tecnologia” escondidos no telhado. Building smart cities.