SpacePlace

[Space and Place] Moving forward bookcrossing

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A new trend after bookcrossing (releasing books into the "wild" to be found by other people, often strangers) and geocaching : leaving unique coins for other people at interesting locations.

Over 1,000 coins have been distributed since April of 2000 at various sites in the United States, Canada (British Columbia), Brazil, Britain, Cuba, Israel, Japan, and Palestine. Within the United States, coins have been placed in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington D.C., and Washington state.

[Space and Place] A sprawl dictionnary: sprawl dark semantic

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Dolores Hayden from Yale School of Architecture (and her students) coined lots of interesting terms to name suburban features (quotes taken here):

. "The town's zoning code was so convoluted nobody could read it," she recalled. "After a while I got to see that a lot of it was designed to frustrate discussion rather than enable it." At the same time, she noticed that her graduate students at Yale, who came from different disciplines, including American studies, architecture, planning and anthropology, had difficulty describing the everyday American landscape without resorting to impersonal jargon. "I began to see that one of the most useful things to do might be to develop a common language," she said. (...) "There's a toad!" she exclaimed, referring not to a warty amphibian but to a defunct Toys "R" Us (Toad: Temporary, Obsolete, Abandoned or Derelict site). (...) Her personal favorite is boomburb, a word that "gives the feeling of a place that's growing double-digits when you say it," she said.

There are also: lulu (Locally Unwanted Land Use), the banana (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near) and nope (Not on Planet Earth).

[Space and Place] A map larger than the territory

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A Map Larger Than the Territory could be a way to draw your elephant paths :) Here is the path we took in Paris last week-end

"A Map Larger Than the Territory" is a Web application that enables participants to represent their paths across the city using images, texts and sounds. Territory here is not a piece of land enclosed within borders but an interlocking network of lines or ways through. The map materialises and connects individual trajectories.

How does it work? Choose a city and a language. The map shows other people's paths in that city. A button at the right sends you to a blind map where you can add an itinerary of your own. To do so, you must first give it a name, a date and a color. Use the tools provided to locate places on the map and define points on your path. Each time you mark a location, a dialog box opens up for you to identify and describe it. When you have finished marking up your path, you can view the itinerary you have made.

Scenario: Karen O'Rourke Programming: Cesar Restrepo

[Space and Place] New houses/flat

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The french magazine Le Courrier International has an interesting hors-série on the topic of new ways to live in houses/flat. It deals with wooden skyscrapers, mini-house, ecotech, post-communists houses, renewed castle, containers... The container thing and the japanese small houses are definitely my favorites. This concept of a container city in London seems great:

Containers are an extremely flexible method of construction, being both modular in shape, extremely strong structurally and readily available.

Container Cities offer an alternative solution to traditional space provision. They are ideal for office and workspace, live-work and key-worker housing.

[LocativeMedia] A location based fishing game

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Swordfish:

Swordfish™ is North America's first location-based fishing game designed for Java enabled mobile phones that are GPS equipped.  The game system is comprised of three main components:  the client software that resides on the phone, KnowledgeWhere's Location Application Platform (LAP), and the mobile providers' location-based system (LBS). Swordfish client software provides the gaming interface to the end-user.  It is written in J2ME but can easily be converted to BREW. 

[Space and Place] Destroyed Buildings in Dresden

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Yesterday I went to a photo museum and there were nice pictures of cities destroyed by the war. I am always impressed by this. I tried to find pictures in the same line and it reminded me the one of Dresden after the war. It is amazing. The last one is definitely my favorite, I cannot find the author of those picture, it is a shame.

[Space and Place] Collaborative Photography in a Rio Favela

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What a nice project! The author bought 20 camera and gave them to kids in Rocinha, the largest favela in Rio. The webiste shows the picture they took. Cheap collaborative photography!

I was thinking about how much the kids enjoyed using my camera, and wouldn't it be interesting to see what they photographed on their own, if they had their own cameras. And so The Plan was formed. A few of us from the hostel spent the next several hours buying out the disposable camera inventory of every street-side camera store we could find.