Category : cities

From the movie All.I.Can by Sherpas Cinema, this is the JP Auclair Street Segment directed by Dave Mossop & JP Auclair and shot in the town of Nelson, B.C.

At Ground Zero, the death of Osama bin Laden was greeted with great jingoistic fervor within hours. But the next morning underneath Williamsburg it was a different story.

There are lots of photo essays documenting the growing fallowness of Detroit, but Andrew Moore’s photos of Motown ruins are my favorite.

Ross Ching shows how attractive L.A. is when you get rid of the cars in Running on Empty. Ching was inspired by a similar project of still photographs, Empty L.A., from L.A. photographer Matt Logue.

Interesting series from Brooklyn writer Ryan Bradley, where he chronicles a 70-mile walk roundtrip across the L.A. Basin. And he’s not the first to try this stunt. In 2007 British novelist Will Self walked from LAX to his downtown hotel 17 miles away.

Fresno’s been hit hard by the bursting of the housing bubble, where 12% of the homes there had some type of foreclosure filing in 2009. Few have benefited from this abundance of vacant homes like skaters. Cannonball, from the great new short film blog California is a place, shows how the backyards of Fresno have become one, big skater amusement park.

This is amazing. Reggie Watts deconstructs the shite out of classic rap cliches. And the beat is irresistible. Bad words are used.

Pixels by Patrick Jean.

Ride along with Seattle’s new mayor Mike McGinn as he bikes to work –6 miles each way to City Hall.

Tropisms > Chernobyl > Lost Souls from POLYMORF.

The New York TImes has created a great infographic that looks at Netflix rental patterns, neighborhood by neighborhood, in a dozen cities. Who knew Mad Men was such a consistent demographic predictor.

Because you were curious, here’s how San Francisco streets got their names.

Take a look at some of the most beautiful subway stations in the world.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro has been busy lately. Fresh from designing one of the more significant new parks on the continent, the High Line, the New York-based architecture firm has also created a terrific 100,000 sq/ft expansion/renovation of the Julliard School. See more great photos of the new space, check out Iwan Baan’s photos.

It’s a interesting time in the Golden State. There are more medical-marijuana dispensaries in L.A. than Starbucks.

You think times are tough for you? At least you don’t own a mall. Once a bulwark of American economy, culture and probably its soul, the shopping mall has fallen on hard times. And to see the decline close up you should check out the site deadmalls.com. So what should we do with this new surfeit of empty big boxes surrounded by oceans of asphalt? There are a few good ideas submitted to Reburbia, a design competition to re-imagine suburbia. One suggestion from the Alabama-based architecture firm Forest Fulton suggests that perhaps the mall should see a reversal of a function and go from being:

a retailer of food – food detached from processes from which it came to be – to producer of food. The parking lot becomes a park-farm. The inside of the big box becomes a greenhouse and restaurant. Asphalt farming techniques allow for layering of soil, compost in containers on top of asphalt. The big box store’s roof is partially replaced with a greenhouse roof. Other details, such as the reversal of parking lot light poles into solar trees that hold photovoltaics can be implemented. One can imagine pushing a shopping cart through this suburban farm and picking your produce right from the vine, with the option to bring your harvest to the restaurant chef for preparation and eating your harvest on the spot.

See more finalists in the Reburbia design competition.

The most beautiful bookstore in the world is the Selexyz Dominicanen in Maastricht, Netherlands. A 700-year-old church refurbished by Dutch architects Merkx + Girod, the Selexyz Dominicanen has a three-story black steel book stack that reaches the stone vaults, and a cafe in the former choir where visitors can sit and admire the restored 14th century ceiling frescoes. Just take a look at this place.

Where y’at New Orleans? Four years after Katrina, architects, planners and builders have made messy, heterogeneous efforts at rebuilding the Crescent City. There’s a great article in the recent Atlantic Monthly profiles some of the approaches to rebuilding that are underway.

In the absence of strong central leadership, the rebuilding has atomized into a series of independent neighborhood projects. And this has turned New Orleans—moist, hot, with a fecund substrate that seems to allow almost anything to propagate—into something of a petri dish for ideas about housing and urban life. An assortment of foundations, church groups, academics, corporate titans, Hollywood celebrities, young people with big ideas, and architects on a mission have been working independently to rebuild the city’s neighborhoods, all wholly unconcerned about the missing master plan. It’s at once exhilarating and frightening to behold.

The generous genius behind San Francisco’s best annual live music festival– Hardly, Strictly Bluegrass– is bringing his cash and his penchant for goodwill problem solving to the dilemma of how to fix local news in San Francisco. Warren Hellman is creating a nonprofit news organization in partnership with KQED, UC Berkeley journalism school and the New York Times.

The plan is to create a multi-media group that will link reporters and editors, KQED’s TV, radio and online capabilities, UC Berkeley’s journalism school’s expertise and the New York Times as the partnership’s “print distribution agent,”

–Noelle Leca, chair of KQED’s board of directors, told the San Francisco Business Times. The launch is set for early 2010.

Happy Park(ing) Day. See a slideshow of the newly-global phenomena and read more.