roomthily

LiquiData

a multitouch application to explore your personal movement profile and to show other people engaging places by adding photos and comments with the help of your smartphone. It can be seen as a rating system that offers people the possibility to discover new spots in an unknown surrounding e.g. during a city-visit. Although a smartphone is not necessary to interact with the system, it offers you the possibility to give insights to your movements through the city and lets you compare your mental map with the reality.

OpenStreetMap edits in Maynooth, Ireland (“Analysing the growth of OpenStreetMap networks” by Corcoran, Mooney and Bertolotto in Spatial Statistics) - densification (red), exploration (green)

via The Atlantic Cities

That evolution looks an awful lot like how physical street networks themselves evolve over time. And, in fact, the Irish researchers behind this project found that OpenStreetMap expands precisely through two processes – “exploration” at the outer edges of the known network, and concurrent “densification” of its core – that have been used to describe how road networks are built.

[…]

Obviously, a new area must be explored before anyone can build out that particular neighborhood’s spiderweb-like side streets. But these two processes occur simultaneously in different parts of the network. Given that OpenStreetMap appears to so closely mirror the growth of real-world infrastructure, the tool may offer the opportunity to understand the expansion of networks in a way that no one was trying to do when these streets were paved in the first place.

Researchers have gone back to look at earlier maps of development. But that process typically involves digging out old paper maps, scanning and digitizing them. And good time stamps aren’t always available to pinpoint a map’s moment in time. But with OpenStreetMap, Corcoran says, “It opens an opportunity to study how networks are growing in real time. OpenStreetMap is currently an evolving process – it’s still not complete. We don’t know when it will reach a stage of maturity.”

atNight: designing the city at night (Mar Santamaria Varas, Pablo Martínez Diez, Jordi Bari Corberó)

Day perception is based on the uniqueness of certain central areas while at night city takes the form of multiple focus which apparently could seem anonymous places in a map, but actually uphold urban identity. We could affirm that nightscapes are built upon presences and absences, the latter understood not as gaps in the mesh of the visible but as the basis on which the visible is based.

mythologyofblue:

Peter Sís

Seattle Area Commuting (or, People Dots)

via UXBlog

sandstone model of Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, in Jaisalmer

via BLDGBLOG

prostheticknowledge:

Blinking Cities by Instant Hutong 

Ongoing project uses urban geographic information as a creative colourful grammar and highlight the changing forms of these places:

Blinking City is a project investigating the inadequacy of traditional maps for city environments characterized by fast pace transformation and urban growth. As soon as the map is done, the city it describes has already gone. We transferredone of the Blinking City pattern, based on a collage of several Hutongneighbourhoods of Beijing, onto a wall of a dilapidated courtyard house inXianyukou district, located in the core of the city

Currently, there are three forms of this project, graffiti, lenticular animated disks, and an animation, embedded below:

BLINKING CITY [ animation ] from instanthutong on Vimeo.

You can find out more about the project here, here, and here.

PS - The Gifs above are not my own, and should be credited to the artist.

ryanpanos:

Relational Cities, by Fabio Alessandro Fusco via Socks Studio

Fabio Alessandro Fusco, Italian architect and teacher, made a set of drawings entitled “Relational Cities”.

“The Relational Cities are conceptual places where to experience the re-writings of the relations among the degraded materials of postmodernity

The relational cities are reifications of possible cities.

The relational cities experience “the dialectical leap from [generic] quantity to quality.”