SpacePlace
Via kottke.org, a nice repository of village maps made completely in ASCII that I intended for an in-game atlas.
Achaea is a fascinating place whose participants have an incredible degree of influence over their collective experience. Unlike many other MMORPGs, players in Achaea can genuinely steer the direction of world events for the better of some and perhaps even to the detriment of others. I could wax on for pages but suffice to say it’s an impressive creation
Situationist Theses on Traffic by Guy-Ernest Debord written several years ago:
A mistake made by all the city planners is to consider the private automobile (and its by-products, such as the motorcycle) as essentially a means of transportation. In reality, it is the most notable material symbol of the notion of happiness that developed capitalism tends to spread throughout the society. The automobile is at the center of this general propaganda, both as supreme good of an alienated life and as essential product of the capitalist market: It is generally being said this year that American economic prosperity is soon going to depend on the success of the slogan "Two cars per family."Commuting time, as Le Corbusier rightly noted, is a surplus labor which correspondingly reduces the amount of "free" time.
We must replace travel as an adjunct to work with travel as a pleasure.
one step beyond proposes a collaborative mapping of haunted places all around the world:
Pictures taken from Le Viaduc de Millau thread. This impressive bridge, built in south west of France is 300m high.
high speed train (HST) network asked Doors of Perception Group to organize a workshop about services to improve train travel:
Today's high speed train (HST) travel is a marvel of speed and profligate resource consumption. It is transforming the experience of space and time of 13 million travellers who already use it each year - and of citizens who live in places where the trains deign to stop. Enormous infrastructure projects are under way, but we have not made space for reflection on the cultural consequences of it all. To fill this gap, the High Speed Network Platform, an association of 15 European regions, and Urban Unlimited, a planning firm, have asked Doors of Perception to organise a cultural expert workshop on the theme, "quality time". The aim is to develop project ideas for services and situations that connect people, cultural resources, and places, in new combinations. The workshop is full, but we'll bring you the results in a later edition.
Banana time is a concept coined by sociologist Donald Roy. It captures how employees have made workplaces more tolerable by participating in off-task camaraderie. Banana time was the collectively determined break time of factory workers, the start of which was signaled with a lunch box banana. It seems that the Internet has supplied new tremendous dimensions to workplace recreations as attested by this paper: "CONSTRUCTIVE APPROACHES TO INTERNET RECREATION IN THE WORKPLACE" by Jo Ann Oravec
Version Magazine is a nice reference for psychogeography freaks like me :) Four issues are available and their map of the world project is cool as well.
THE MAP OF THE WORLD is a world map, printed with the dimensions of 137x232cm and fixed on metal boards. In contrast with an ordinary map we erased all the countries' names and capitals. We left only the administrative borders.The capitals attached with magnetic supports can be moved on the map's surface. The idea took shape in 1999, while one of us lived in France and the others still in Romania. In the middle of a chat it occurred to us ... what if Bucharest would be in France? This was one of the departure points of this project: the desire of moving, of changing spaces, of re-designing others` contexts. As Deleuze said "areas of contact." From here we tried to invent a tool for dialogue and the result is expressed in THE MAP OF THE WORLD. We call it a tool, because we don't consider it an "art object." but rather an 'auxiliary' for debates, interventions or workshops linked to different issues such as globalization, cultural emigration, tourist standardization, trajectory and different kinds of transgressions.
New Architecture school in Paris (Frédéric Borel is the Architect), built close this ancient industrial facility:
I am a great fan of the architecture of World Financial Center (by Cesar Pelli). Great stuff, especially the top.Unfortunately, those following pictures were taken 9 11 2001 and some towers are missing in the background.
I just saw the new Enki Bilal's movie Immortel Ad Vitam. I really liked this esthetic, a kind of retro-futurist arty architecture:
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The action takes place in NYC in 2095, the WTC has been redesigned in a very odd way (which I like). I think the author kept the Battery Park buildings which are already in this spirit: their top in particular is so original !
Cruising around on the Web, I found those pictures of destroyed buildings in Sarajevo. This is just meant to remenber that war occured in Europe in 1990s... I see this as possible pictures of our future. In previous wars indeed, there were not lots of high rises. It's a kind of dark blade runner future like Enki Bilal's comics. This is truly the way I see an apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic future like the sci-fi series Robotech. I don't really know why I am fascinated with this mix of technology/remnants of civilization and return to a more nomadic/tough situation. That does not mean that I would like such a world ! Definitely not ! Let's try to avoid this.
For all of you, like me who happen to like the most exquisite book of Gabriel Garcia Marquez "One hundred years of solitude", the map of Macondo has been drawn by the Class of 2004 at St. Stephen's Episcopal School Houston:
Dealing with prospective and technology, I like those people who has to figure out perversion or bad uses of technology. That is part of the job. This is another way to creatively think about technology ! For instance, I found the following here:
3G Pre-paid Services and Money Laundering
A drug dealer has collected substantial sums of cash from his dealings and wishes to lodge this in various onshore bank accounts without raising suspicion. He uses his team to take out a number of pre-paid subscriptions, using faked identities. He then has his team members buy large denomination pre-paid top-ups in large volume, and he credits each account with several thousand dollars.
Using these heavily topped-up handsets, the dealer now purchases large quantities of merchandise in this simplified scenario. He then retails this merchandise from local stores, which he has rented or purchased, and lodges the proceeds in the bank, as legitimate takings from commerce.
3G in conjunction with the pre-paid service concept and loopholes in subscriber vetting and identification, places a sophisticated financial device capable of extensive cross-border utilisation in the hands of anonymous organised criminals, again on a global basis.
If your are into parking interface, go there .
Due to the fact that Ive visited The Home Depot approximately 2,483 times this winter Ive noticed something. The parking interface for the store is unacceptable. Im not talking about a web site here.
I like this kind of statement even though I don't fully agree with all the development.
Nice piece of work in the harvard gazette about this very topic: What makes a city thrive? I put some excerpts here.
The population density of Paris is about three times that of Boston. Does this mean Paris is three times as much fun as Boston, or that if Boston's population were compounded by three, it would become another Paris?
On Jan. 28, the Kennedy School's Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston in cooperation held a forum at Harvard to examine the concept of density and to look at ways it could be achieved.
"There's been an ongoing struggle to strengthen the city core, but not always to increase urban density. "
While it might not quite stack up to Paris, it can hardly be said that Boston is lacking in vibrancy. And yet, if present trends continue, there may be trouble ahead. Over the past 40 years, Boston's population has gone from 800,000 to 600,000.
According to the pro-density argument, urban institutions require a certain threshold population to support them. If not enough people want to shop or eat out, there won't be many good stores or restaurants. If the audience for music, theater, or art is small, these activities will not flourish. If the tax base is scanty, schools and municipal services will be substandard. Even parks need people to use them, and if the parks are deserted, they will not receive the upkeep they need to remain attractive.
Density is also considered good for the environment because it is easier and cheaper to provide heating, electricity, sewerage, and other services to people living in concentrated groups than to those in single-family homes in suburban areas. As a result, the impact of dense populations on the surrounding environment is less harmful.
If density is such a good thing, why haven't more people gotten the message? The first panel took up this question. David Parrish brought up the point that whether people want to take advantage of the social and cultural advantages of the city or seek the sprawling suburbs depends on where they are in the life cycle.
"A wise old man once told me, if you're looking for someone to have sex with, you live in the city; if you've got someone to have sex with, you live in the suburbs. Sometimes I think it may be as simple as that."
"Density used to be associated with poverty," said BSA President David Dixon
Alfred Wojciechowski, a principal in a Boston design firm, said that for density to work, people have to feel comfortable moving out into the public realm.
"It's very much about walkability. Goods and services have to be immediately available. You have to be able to walk to them."
In many cases, achieving greater density means building taller buildings, something that often proves unpopular, especially in the Boston area.
"We're an awfully conservative city when it comes to high buildings," said David Lee, a partner in a Boston architectural firm
In the Part Dieu area, in front of the station, close to the shopping mall:
Via space and culture, some abandoned subway stations, platforms, trolleys, railroads...: here
Howard Rheingold on the feature:
People whose lives and whose children's lives were changed by the coming of the automobile failed to foresee the social side-effects of this wonderful new invention that brought freedom and power to so many people, so quickly. Can we foresee the mobilecom-dominated society any better than we planned for the automobile dominated society? (...) It's no secret that the automobile changed courtship patterns. Not only did physical mobility make hooking up possible for people who lived beyond walking distance of one another or lacked easy access to public transportation, the automobile itself furnished a somewhat cramped but conveniently mobile place for two people to be alone together. And adultery became more easily accomplished. The automobile certainly changed the shape of cities, the way people used cities, and the size of cities. Steven Johnson pointed out in his book Emergence that telephones made skyscrapers possible, since there was a limit to the height pneumatic tubes could convey messages in a building. The wireline phone even gave rise to a new form of settlement, the suburb.(...)How can I use those examples to examine mobile telephony? We know from the work of Ito, Seyler-Ling, and others that adolescent mating patterns changed rapidly with the introduction of the mobile phone, particularly via texting. In regard to adultery, the mobile phone has proved to be an enabler, and also as a way for suspicious spouses to catch the adulterers. In the former case as an enabler, we've heard of married men who use a "shag phone" exclusively for communications with their lovers, and in the latter case as a detector, suspicious spouses have used the call records built into their husband's or wive's mobile phone to catch them.
I like this comment:
What will happen if cheap networked devices that can reliably report their current locations on demand become cheap and as widely-used as today's standard mobile phones? What if people can broadcast (or narrowcast) pings and preference ratings from anywhere by hitting a single thumbs-up or thumbs-down button, Tivo style? If city dwellers and suburbanites can explore live and historic visualizations of the activities and preferences of their friends, colleagues and family and of strangers as well, what will this mean? What happens if people regularly examine the preferences and activities of groups ranging from small circles of friends to thousands of people simultaneously, in aggregate? What if most people in a city can add their own preference and location information (as well as decoys and misleading information) to these socio-geographic data pools throughout the day?
Here are just two possibilities: -Things get worse and these inward-focused bubbles are reinforced. This technology encourages people to focus ever more closely on their own lives and those of their small circles of friends as separate from the rest of the world. Now a person can ignore neighbors and the outside world even more because at any moment he can view an up-to-the-moment display of the activities of his circle of friends and colleagues. Group preference and activity maps can be made private and exclusive, closed off to the outside world. Such technologies might lead to widespread social balkanization by reducing mixing between groups, by making it easier for each clique to gather in and move among private venues or venues that are far from other groups. Drivers in the twentieth century occasionally escaped their automobile/garage/home/office bubbles in places such as grocery stores, parks, bars and cafes, where they crossed paths with people outside their groups. Will locative technologies just provide tools for retreating into the bubble in these places -- tools even more effective than the Walkman and the mobile phone?
-Things get better. Location-based technology encourages people burst the bubbles, to widen their focus and become more conscious of their neighborhoods and communities as a whole. The tools can provide new ways for people to explore and observe and appreciate activities of and suggestions from people who they might not otherwise encounter, and this could bring a region's disparate groups together. A timid person who happens into an unfamiliar neighborhood might not normally explore the cultural attractions nearby, even if he has an hour to kill. But if he glances at a display that shows a friend a block away, he might link up with that friend to visit places he wouldn't explore alone. In the cities, young nightlife aficionados who use such services might engage in more bar-hopping and party-hopping as they check out up-to-the-minute visualizations showing hundreds of their friends' activities and ratings simultaneously, in aggregate. Location-based services might make getting from place to place via public transit much easier, further encouraging travel between nightlife destinations, and further encouraging mixing between different groups of people.
This is becoming far too long for a comment, so I'll cut it off. But an important point: as technical geeks and social-science geeks we can try to predict the future like this, but this is the sort of tech that really won't arise from the geeks. It will be defined and shaped by the regular people who use it. The best we can do is release minimal versions of locative services to people, watch what they do with them, then iteratively build them up to serve those uses and desires. I think our best hope for bursting the bubbles lies in avoiding overly-restrictive standards and definitions of these technologies, and encouraging open, hackable, evolvable approaches to building these tools.
Nice piece of text about possible life under the street of NYC:
The mole people, as documented in an eponymous 1993 book by Jennifer Toth, are homeless people who live in subway tunnels, sucking down electricity and other resources for free a la Ellison's Invisible Man.