Urban Planet is a daily roundup of 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 1979, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority unveiled a redesign of its iconic subway system map. The redesign was an attempt to bring clarity to the tangle of colours and lines that crisscross the five boroughs. But as Matt Flegenheimer at the New York Times reports, the designers made some serious errors: “On the West Side of Manhattan, beginning near Lincoln Center and extending toward the campus of Columbia University, Broadway is seemingly misplaced. It is west of Amsterdam Avenue at West 66th Street when it should be east. It drifts toward West End Avenue near 72nd Street, where it should intersect with Amsterdam. It overtakes West End Avenue north of the avenue’s actual endpoint near West 107th Street, creating several blocks of fictitious Upper West Side real estate.” Designers John Tauranac and Michael Hertz are still fighting over authorship of the design, and its errors.
• What’s tall and full and leafy all over? Vancouver’s parking garages. Valcent Products recently signed an agreement with several garage owners to build the 6,000-square-foot vertical farm. The “VertiCrop” farming structure will feature 12-foot-high stacks of growing trays that will move around to catch water and sunlight. (Designing Healthy Communities)
• Is a neighbourhood defined by geographical borders or by the set of people that flow in and out of it? This is the hypothesis being tested by researchers at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Their platform, Livehoods, uses foursquare check in data to map out who is visiting what venues where and when. This information is grouped into patterns which are then used to map neighbourhoods. (Flowing Data)
• Listen to the sweet sounds of the Copenhagen Philharmonic serenading Danish commuters. (Huffington Post)
Image from Vertical Theory
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