Understanding Urbanity: 7 Must-Read Books About Cities. By Maria Popova What airports have to do with Medieval towns, Brooklyn’s bookstores and Le Corbusier.
“Cities are the crucible of civilization,” proclaimed Geoffrey West at last month’s TED Global. Cities are where most of humanity’s creative and intellectual ideation, communication, and innovation takes place, so understanding cities is vital to understanding our civilization. To help do that, here is an omnibus of seven fantastic books exploring the complex and faceted nature, function, history, and future of urbanity’s precious living organism, from design to sociology to economics and beyond. Richard Florida, apart from being one of the most continuously stimulating people to follow on Twitter and a fellow contributor to The Atlantic, is also one of the most insightful people writing and thinking about cities today. The so-called death of place is hardly a new story. Ultimately, Who’s Your City? But happily life has one predictable attribute: it is full of surprises. Thanks, Sean. Open Source Mapping: GIS For The Rest Of Us.
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Data drives planning decisions, and those who have the data have the most power in making them. Unfortunately, it is usually governments and companies that have the data, and their decisions on planning and development impact our communities. The tools used to create and analyze data are expensive—for U.S. residents, a copy of ESRI’s ArcView GIS software is $1,500 for the most basic version. Most communities do not have the resources to purchase this type of software, nor do they have the ability to buy data collection tools such as a Trimble GeoExplorer.
How can we involve communities in the creation and analysis of data so that they may help make and influence decisions about their neighborhoods? Flickr Showing Photographs Georeferenced. With a cell phone and a Flickr account, a community could create a map like the Burlington Pothole Map, showing the city where the streets are in need of repair.
A Map Showing Potholes In Burlington. Deploying Urban Space. In Rebel Cities, David Harvey says places like Tahrir Square and Zuccotti Park are key tools for revolution.
Activists in places like Tahrir Square in Cairo and Zuccotti Park in Manhattan made urban space a powerful force in struggles against dictators and global capital. The high-rise public-housing projects that stood as monuments to failed federal policy and desperate urban poverty through the second half of the 20th century are nearly gone. Conceived in the 1930s as visionary solutions to the problem of deteriorated tenements, by the 1960s the modernist towers were viewed as “warehouses” for the urban African-American poor. St. Louis’ reckoning was among the earliest and most spectacular: The 1972 photograph of the implosion of one of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe towers marked “the death of modernism.”
Left behind is an urban landscape shorn of almost all remnants of public housing’s brutal history. Urban space, moreover, was – and continues to be – a tool in social struggles. 21 Cities Call for Solutions to Improve Lives of 120 Million Citizens. This is a community post, untouched by our editors.
Urbanization is one of the world’s mega-trends, so it is surprising that the majority of the world’s 557,000 Mayors do not share their challenges with the world. That is why we created the Living Labs Global Award that in its current edition (submission deadline 17th of February 2012) has brought together 21 leading global cities, among them San Francisco, Rome, Glasgow, Hamburg, Cape Town, Rio de Janeiro, Fukuoka and Mexico City to call for solutions that could significantly improve their citizens’ lives. Eindhoven Summit on Service Innovation in Cities. Source: Living Labs Global This is an original contribution to the on-going global dialogue on smart cities.
So what is it that cities want? Active e-Bike / Callock. Take the example of San Francisco’s call to integrate the wireless control of urban systems. Cities are not light-hearted about putting forward these challenges. Share this... it may just change the world.