Mapping the Subways of North America
via ohhleary:
XKCD, transit, and geography nerdery, all in one? This makes my day.
Saying goodbye to a key part of the urban landcape over the last 50+ years…
via nycdoitt:
Check out the video of the Reinvent Payphones Information Session held on January 23, 2013. City officials from eight agencies answered participants’ questions ranging from redesigning public space, to providing amenities in City parks, to integrating with transportation furniture. Here are some key takeaways:
- ….
- Think about how the city could provide new services, useful information, and communications technology while sustaining current revenues.
- Ensure prototypes are future-focused; consider the rapid pace of technological change.
- …
Submit your prototype at nyc.gov/reinventpayphones before 9AM EST on February 18, 2013 and you could help shape the future of New York City’s streets. Competition judges will select up to 15 semi-finalists to present at the Reinvent Payphones demo day on Tuesday, March 5, 2013.
Inevitably, if you change the way people think about cars, you change the urban form that is built around it. That’s possibly another reason that living in urban centers in smaller spaces is growing in popularity; The smart phone’s ability to find out what is happening around you makes the city work better for you, and makes the low density suburb even less attractive.
Your Office Is In Your Pants: How The Smart Phone Is Changing The Way We Live And Work : TreeHugger (via anxiaostudio)
btw, have you heard of foursquare? This is our wheelhouse. We’re inventing this future. Oh, and we’re hiring.
(via dpstyles)
via theatlantic:
A Satellite View of City Growth, in GIFS
Dubai 2000 and 2010:
One of the best examples of the instant megacity, Dubai has changed dramatically since oil was discovered there in the 1960s. The change over just the past decade has been incredible.
Istanbul 1975 and 2011:
As Istanbul goes from blood red to grayish-beige in these images, the population grows from about 2.5 million in 1975 to 13 million in 2011.
See more [Images: NASA and USGS]
Infographic showing population changes in St. Louis, and showing how transit access drives population growth, particularly in more walkable parts of the city.
Because every successful sports team in the late 1980s made a music video, St. Louis made this video to try linking winning St. Louis Cardinals team with economic development in the city of St. Louis. In spite of the new construction highlighted in the video, the city was still vulnerable to the same urban flight that plagued many American cities in the Eighties, losing over 60k residents between 1980 and 1990 census.
Sold On Saint Louis Music Video circa 1987 (by PulseSTL)
In 1820 a little-known architect named Thomas Wilson proposed a plan for “a metropolitan cemetery on a scale commensurate with the necessities of the largest city in the world, embracing prospectively the demands of centuries, sufficiently capacious to receive five million of the dead, where they may repose in perfect security, without interfering with the comfort, the health, the business, the property, or the pursuits of the living.” What he proposed, in short, was a massive pyramid, its base covering eighteen acres and its height well above that of St. Peter’s Cathedral—a metropolitan sepulcher, a skyscraper for the dead.
—From Colin Dickey’s new Roundtable post, “Skyscrapers of the Dead.” His essay, “Necropolis,” on cemeteries and urban spaces, is featured in our Fall 2010 issue on The City.
