Atlas of Urban Expansion
Oodles and oodles of data on cities, including gorgeous animations of urban growth over time.
Link tags: cities
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Tinnitus Tracker
Rob has turned his exhaustive spreadsheet of all the concerts he has attended into a beautiful website. Browse around—it’s really quite lovely!
Rob’s also writing about the making of the site over on his blog.
Barely Maps
Minimalist cartography.
Folding Beijing - Uncanny Magazine
The terrific Hugo-winning short story about inequality, urban planning, and automation, written by Hao Jinfang and translated by Ken Liu (who translated The Three Body Problem series).
Hao Jinfang also wrote this essay about the story:
I’ve been troubled by inequality for a long time. When I majored in physics as an undergraduate, I once stared at the distribution curve for American household income that showed profound inequality, and tried to fit the data against black-body distribution or Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution. I wanted to know how such a curve came about, and whether it implied some kind of universality: something as natural as particle energy distribution functions, so natural it led to despair.
Medieval Fantasy City Generator by watabou
Procedurally generated medieval town plans. Pick a size and then have some fun with the “warp” option.
The Hipster Index: Brighton Pips Portland to Global Top Spot
In what is quite likely the greatest, most poetic showdown since the Thrilla in Manila, Brighton and Hove of the United Kingdom beat Portland of the USA by one-thousandth of a point. Portland scored 8.1631, Brighton scored 8.1632. No really. Brighton is scientifically the most hipster city in the world. Just.
Empty half the Earth of its humans. It’s the only way to save the planet | Kim Stanley Robinson | Cities | The Guardian
Kim Stanley Robinson explores the practicalities of E.O. Wilson’s Half Earth proposal.
There is no alternative way; there is no planet B. We have only this planet, and have to fit our species into the energy flows of its biosphere. That’s our project now. That’s the meaning of life, in case you were looking for a meaning.
Metropolis Now - The Atlantic
A collection of essays on cities and technology. Contributors include Bruce Sterling, James Bridle, and Adam Greenfield.
Designing Systems, Part 3: Components and Composition / Paul Robert Lloyd
Paul finishes up his excellent three part series by getting down to the brass tacks of designing and building components on the web …and in cities. His closing provocation has echoes of Heydon’s rallying cry.
If you missed the other parts of this series, they are:
Designing Systems: Theory, Practice, and the Unfortunate In-between / Paul Robert Lloyd
Paul is turning his excellent talk on design systems into a three part series. Here’s part one, looking at urban planning from Brasília to London.
City Objects
A catalogue of objects and observations from cities around the world.
Cameron’s World
A wonderful collection of treasures excavated from GeoCities. Explore, enjoy, and remember what a crime it is that Yahoo wiped out so much creativity and expression.
Ignite Bristol 07 - Dan Williams - Walt Disney World - YouTube
I’m at Disney World for a special edition of An Event Apart, so this lightning talk from Dan Williams seems appropriate to revisit.
Edible Geography
I’m not sure how I managed to miss this site up until now, but it’s right up my alley: equal parts urban planning, ethnography, and food science.
Paris Review – “One Murder Is Statistically Utterly Unimportant”: A Conversation with Warren Ellis, Molly Crabapple
Molly Crabapple interviews Warren Ellis. Fun and interesting …much like Molly Crabapple and Warren Ellis.
Building the Great Libraries of the Internet with a DNS time machine by Ben Ward
Ben proposes an alternative to archive.org: changing the fundamental nature of DNS.
Regarding the boo-hooing of how hard companies have it maintaining unprofitable URLs, I think Ben hasn’t considered the possibility of a handover to a cooperative of users—something that might yet happen with MySpace (at least there’s a campaign to that effect; it will probably come to naught). As Ben rightly points on, domain names are leased, not bought, so the idea of handing them over to better caretakers isn’t that crazy.
This is now!
A thoroughly addictive use of the Instagram API (along with Node.js and Socket.io): see a montage of images being taken in a city right now.
Grids, Design Guidelines, Broken Rules, and the Streets of New York City (Global Moxie)
Josh writes about the importance of using rules and systems as tools without being bound by them.
ARCHIVE TEAM: A Distributed Preservation of Service Attack - YouTube
Jason’s rip-roaring presentation from Defcon last year.
What Goes Up, Doesn’t Have To Come Down
A thoughtful—and beautifully illustrated—piece by Geri on memory and digital preservation, prompted by the shut-down of Gowalla.