Greater Los Angeles. I got back from Los Angeles last night and my head is still spinning. I'd move there again in a heartbeat. There are three great cities in the United States: there's Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York – in that order. I love Boston; I even love Denver; I like Miami; I think Washington DC is habitable; but Los Angeles is Los Angeles. You can't compare it to Paris, or to London, or to Rome, or to Shanghai. [Image: L.A., as photographed by Marshall Astor]. No matter what you do in L.A., your behavior is appropriate for the city. [Image: An extraordinary photograph, called 4.366 Braille, by jenlund70]. And maybe that means renting Hot Fuzz and eating too many pretzels; or maybe that means driving a Prius out to Malibu and surfing with Daryl Hannah as a means of protesting something; or maybe that means buying everything Fredric Jameson has ever written and even underlining significant passages as you visit the Westin Bonaventura.
Is the new economic geography passé? Paul Krugman suggests that his Nobel-prize-winning “core-periphery” model was perhaps more relevant a century ago than today. This appears to be true in terms of overall manufacturing concentrations in Europe and North America, which are unravelling. Large-scale agglomeration forces, however, are alive and well in the developing world, as are localised sectoral clustering phenomena in industrialised countries. In his Nobel Prize lecture on December 8, Paul Krugman argued that his core-periphery model of economic geography is in some sense becoming obsolete. It is not true that “the latest wrinkle in theory must be the latest wrinkle in the way the world works”, he pointed out, and he went on to speculate that “the world is becoming less new geography and more classical”.
Long-established regional manufacturing concentrations in Europe and North America provided the original empirical inspiration behind the new economic geography. Source: Brülhart and Sbergami (2008), Table 1. Total Immersion and the “Transfigured City:” Shared Augmented Realities, the “Web Squared Era,” and Google Wave Above is an image above from Total Immersion’s augmented reality experience developed for the “Networked City” exhibition in South Korea, – “a fun scenario created for a u-City’s infrastructure and city management service” “To the naked eye, the exhibit looks like a bare bones model of a city. But when visitors put on the special AR goggles a whole new world unfolds – as graphics overlaid on the city model.” (Games Alfresco) “The Networked City,” is a large scale augmented virtuality of a scenario for a networked city. But my guess, reading the Korea IT Times, is the plan is to move from an augmented virtuality to an augmented reality as Incheon Free Economic Zone (IFEZ) realizes its vision to become a leading u-City – where reality is turned “inside out” (see Inside Out: Interaction Design for Augmented Reality ).
Ubiquitous computing and augmented reality are like adenine and thymine – a DNA base pair. A sky view of Incheon Free Economic Zone (from Korean IT Times). 1. And, secondly: The City is A Battlesuit For Surviving the Future | Beyond The Beyond. You must look at this amazing artifact out of the BERG cluster in London. I’d like to call this “the greatest design-fiction writing I’ve ever seen,” but (a) it’s not about design, (b) it’s not fictional and (c) it’s not even writing. This is new. The web has broken a lot of silos between the disciplines in the past 10 years, but this is a new thing that is visibly rising out of that rubble.
It’s not possible to read this in the way that texts were once read. This BERG screed is weirder than Archigram. I know the work of Archigram pretty well, and I appreciated the way they flirted with science fictional ideas and imagery while remaining focussed on architectural practice. This piece is doing the same futuristic thing that Archigram did decades ago, except for us, for now, in our idiom, with our techniques. Io9 calls itself a science fiction weblog, and they’re glowing like a little furnace today. The City Is A Battlesuit For Surviving The Future - Future metro - io9. Cities always provided a protective function, and it's one of the tragedies of our time that, e.g. in the case of new orleans, they are not capable of providing that function (due to various reasons)...some quotes and some remarks on the great article: "...the way the street feels may soon be defined by what cannot be seen by the naked eye. " a rather mcluhanesque euphoria washes over me right now and is gone rather quickly. i would wonder how differential perceptibility generated by some kind of digital gadget (which the quote implies, i guess?)
Influences the egalitarian character of society... "He posits that we will move from a city we browser and wander to a 'searchable, query-able' city that we can not only read, but write-to as a medium. " we can already. it's called grafitti. "Behaviour and information as the raw material to design cities with as much as steel, glass and concrete. " in all, this is not meant as criticism, but perhaps an addition to Matt's contribution. thanks! Cities and smart culture. Jaap Stronks pointed via Twitter to this smartmobby book, called ‘Mediapolis‘, of 010 publishers in Rotterdam Thanx Jaap, you are right Mobile Cities florish! See The Mobile City Conference !! Mediapolis ’Every generation must build its own city’ Alex de Jong, Marc Schuilenburg 232 pp / 227 x 152 mm / paperback ISBN 978 90 6450 628 4 published 2007 Games like America’s Army, World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto and the music of Snoop ‘Doggy’ Dogg, Dizzee Rascal and Juan Atkins are fuelling the engines of globalization.
As a result, popular culture is taking an ever firmer grip on our living environment and on our lives. Quote of Siebe Thissen reviewing this book: Mediapolis is an exciting and particularly intriguing book. Be Sociable, Share! Mobile cities conference. The Mobile City conference 27 & 28 February 2008 NAi (Netherlands Architecture Institute) Rotterdam, The Netherlands Announcement & Call for Participation www.themobilecity.nl “The Mobile City” is a two-day conference about locative & mobile technologies, urban culture and identity.
The Mobile City brings academics, architects, urban professionals and media designers together to address the question: what happens to urban culture when physical and digital spaces merge? Background The physical, geographical city with its piazza’s, its neighbourhoods and crossings intersects with the ‘virtual space’ of electronic communication-, information- and observation-networks of GSM, GPS, CCTV, UMTS, WIFI, RFID, etc. Conference questions Locative and mobile media can be understood as interfaces between the digital domain and the city, as bridges between the social processes that formerly took place in more separated domains (digital or physical) but now are spilling over into each other. Weblog Practical.