Each week we will be focusing on blogs from around the world dealing specifically with urban environments. We’ll be on the lookout for websites outside the country that approach themes related to urban experiences and issues.
• In response to NJ Transit’s Quiet Cars, Alex Marshall at NY Daily News has a proposal: conversation cars. “With a pair of earbuds, we can all have as much solitude as we’d like,” he writes. So why not open up some space for chatting with a fellow traveller?
• Nearly every large North American city has a phantom highway: an unbuilt or torn down expressway which influenced the trajectory of development in one way or another. Tom Vanderbilt (Slate) profiles the phantom highways of New York, LA, Chicago, Toronto, San Francisco, Washington, D.C. and Seoul.
• Pop Up City comments on the digital reincarnation of an old art form: love songs for cities. The article features three beautiful video tributes to Stockholm, Detroit and Toronto.
• For those who measure the year in routes and tracks, The Transport Politic has a map and calendar of every North American transit construction project scheduled for 2011.
• Streetsblog applauds London’s bike superhighways and encourages Toronto to take a look at the 70% increase in cycling along said routes in weighing the costs of its own bike lane development.
• Urban demographic change is occurring cities the world over. OPENCities aims to identify links between these demographic changes and governance, internationalization and competitiveness. The site currently offers “openness” data for 26 cities and intends to expand to 100 in 2012.
Photo by Cliff1066
Do you have a World Wide Wednesday worthy article you’d like to share? Send the link to www@spacing.ca