LA Timelapse Map ~ Infra, Nets, Pop, Econ, etc!

The Getty Research Institute shares timelapse maps of Los Angeles Instrastructure, Networks, Settlements, Population, Economy, and Conflicts!

Manhattan's Densities ~ Rise & Fall 1800-2010

Nice timelapse animation of Manhattan's Densities changing over two centuries based on data collected by Shlomo Angel and Patrick Lamson-Hall of the NYU Stern Urbanization Project!

Emergent Megacities ~ VC Visualizes thru 2100

Visual Capitalist animates Top 20 Megacities by 2100...

Small Farmer Tools ~ Simple Efficient Solutions

This past few weeks I've discovered both Richard Perkins, Making Small Farms Work, and Curtis Stone, the Urban Farmer. I've been trying to understand the combined notions of (1) smallholder farming, (2) using permaculture & "organic" approaches, all while (3) having a profit-making orientation and these two are really good about pinning things down with numbers, planning their steps and documenting their actions, and analyzing and tuning for moneymaking. Anyways, today I just want to spotlight a couple of simple efficient solutions they're both champions of. First, the Japanese paperpot method of seedling-starting and transplanting into beds (which Stone sells via his Paperpot venture)... Second, the quick-cut and cut-again greens harvester... FYI, Perkins is also getting into the business of selling the solutions with this Farmers Tools venture. Note that neither Stone nor Perkins are the direct inventors of these tools, but they've each been really prolific in using them profitably and especially in demonstrating how they can be amazingly effective! Check out their respective YouTube channels, Ridgedale Permaculture and Urban Farmer.

Pearl Supercity ~ River Delta Conurbation!

The recent opening of world's longest (55km) sea-crossing bridge between Hong Kong + Macao + Zhuhai completes the southern connection linking a half-dozen Chinese megacities into a ~70M+ inhabitant supercity as Visual Capitalist shows...

Flood Resiliency ~ Dutch Lessons for World Cities

Rising sea levels generally and ocean storm surges, river floodwaters, and intense rainfalls particularly inspire new kinds of thinking about water management, going beyond higher dikes and barriers towards more defense-in-depth, including flood-friendly construction, making room for the rivers, and building absorbent greener cities. Here are some good surveys of this movement...

Dutch Greenscraper ~ Utrecht's Hawthorn Tower...

Inhabitat spotlights Dutch city Utrecht to have new greenbuilding complex near central train station...

"The Hawthorn Tower will, like its Milanese predecessor, be blanketed in greenery -- and it’s expected to absorb over 5.4 tons of carbon dioxide. The equivalent of one hectare of woods will be installed on the tower to create a real urban ecosystem with over 30 different vegetal species."

Global Urban Footprint ~ Hi-Rez Auto-mapping...

TR spots Global Urban Footprint Revealed in Unprecedented Resolution...

"What’s needed is a way of mapping urban areas from space at high resolution and in a way that is unaffected by cloud cover and without the ambiguities that traditional imaging introduces. [Now revealed is] a global map of urbanization that meets all these requirements. The result is a data set of the entire planet at a resolution of 12 meters that maps the global urban footprint with unprecedented accuracy and resolution. [...] Esch and co have created a global database of built-up areas based on synthetic aperture radar images from an Earth-orbiting mission called TanDEM-X. This consists of a pair of spacecraft that have been orbiting Earth in close formation -- just a few hundred meters apart -- since 2007. These spacecraft take radar images of the ground from slightly different angles, allowing researchers to create a 3-D map of the planet. In total, Esch and co have processed 470,000 pairs of images to create their map of the entire planet."

Making of Metropolis ~ Silent-Era Urban SF Epic!

The Making of Metropolis -- and its painstaking restoration story! Incredible special effects! Changing our futurevision!

CityScope Kendall ~ Model Innovation District

I'm co-teaching CityScope Kendall Square class this Spring 2017 together with MIT Media Lab colleague Kent Larson and team, starting Wednesday, 8 February at 2pm, as part of our MIT Cities Initiative. Kendall Square is considered by many to be an ideal innovation district -- but it is dysfunctional as a community due to an extreme lack of amenities, housing, cultural venues, and after-work activity. MIT’s selection as the developer for the 14-acre Volpe Center creates one last opportunity to transform the district into a vibrant and creative center for entrepreneurship. Students will explore an evidence-based, data-driven process that makes use of the CityScope augmented reality platform to design, iterate, and reimagine Kendall Square. Join us at first class Wed afternoon 2pm February 8th, 2017 in Media Lab E15-359.

Shenzhen ~ The Silicon Valley of Hardware

WIRED's Future Cities series spotlights Shenzhen ~ The Silicon Valley of hardware...

Creative Places ~ On Urban Hot Spots Spring '16

I'm co-teaching Creative Places class this Spring 2016 together with MIT Media Lab colleague Kent Larson and team, starting Wednesday, 3 February at 2pm, as part of our MIT Cities Initiative. We're particularly keen on understanding and enabling innovation, entrepreneurship, and creative vitality in cities. We seek better indices (or rankings or scores) and analyses especially of important but often intangible aspects of the city. Ultimately we aspire to deep understanding of how urban attractiveness can be best achieved through design, zoning, development, and more.  Join us at first class Wed afternoon 2pm February 4th, 2016 in Media Lab E14-633.

Urban Growth ~ Mapping Population Dynamics...

The Guardian spotlights Cities in numbers: how patterns of urban growth change the world...

"Beneath the crude statistic that the world is heading towards 70% urbanisation by 2050 lie regional differences in demographic, economic and environmental change. LSE Cities’ Urban Age programme takes a deeper look at the data"

Understanding MIT ~ Crafting Our Creative Place!

My DUSP Campus Planning colleague Bob Simha and I are hosting our Understanding MIT seminar this Fall 2015 every Tuesday afternoon 4-6pm starting September 15th to survey research universities and how they work, with the Institute as our live-case study. Each week, we invite a different senior academic, administrative, or trustee leader of MIT (and at least one rep from our host-city Cambridge) to share with us what they do to help the Institute stay vital in the short, medium, and long term -- and ask what we can do to be pro-active in improving MIT as well.

This is part of my larger action-research agenda on understanding creative places and innovation ecosystems and is sister-class to our our Creative Places seminar and design workshop on Model Cities, both offered in the upcoming Spring 2016.

AVERT Project ~ Swarmbots for Car Roboparking

The DM spots the AVERT Project building swarmbots for robomatically shifting cars around omnidirectionally, allowing much denser space-packing of vehicles in existing parking garages... Nevermind all the mumbo-jumbo about "emergency response" vehicle movement. The big use is storage efficiency!

Ninebot ~ Nextgen Personal Transport Vehicles...

NextBigFuture reports that startup Ninebot with smartphone giant Xiaomi backing buys Segway for alternative transportation unification. They're already shipping the One... (Of course, anyone paying attention would have seen this coming for the last six years or more)

Bulldozing the Future ~ Unwise Preservationism...

Reason's Jim Epstein shares how The Destruction of Penn Station Led to the Landmarks Preservation Movement and re-evaluates it...

"The underground Penn Station that replaced the old structure is a planning nightmare that's outright disliked by the general public, but that’s an argument for replacing it with something new, not saving the flawed structure that preceded it. New York became the world’s preeminent city by letting its developers sometimes violently tear down old buildings. Progress isn't free, and neither is preservation."

Rainworks ~ Water-Activated Urban Art!

Peregrine Church makes Rainworks urban art only seen when wet! Interesting variant on Reverse Graffiti!

Old NYC ~ Vintage Footage, Geocoded...

Very cool oldest motion pictures of NYC with geocoding...

City Lights ~ Colin Rich's LA Timelapse...

Colin Rich's Trilogy of Light final chapter -- City Lights!