Urban Imagineering

Landscape Architect, and Urban Design student pondering the streets of Inner-City Joburg, searching for humanistic urban fabric-inspired by Accidental Urbanists

futurecapetown:

architizer:

Floating cities, Cape Town and New York. Prints by Reinhard Krug.

“I’m a big fan of large cities, and it always fascinates me how they’re little worlds in their own sense,” writes Reinhard Krug. Though the artist’s latest series of prints is called ‘Islands,’ his collaged images of New York, Sydney and Cape Town appear more like floating asteroids, coated with a barnacle-like crust of skyscrapers and infrastructure. In making these intergalactic visual allusions, Krug’s urban portraits depict iconic cities in abstract isolation, reminiscent to the tiny worlds of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince. Meanwhile, the saturated hues of the prints mimic the painted photographs once churned into postcards, evoking the same “wish you were here” sentiment that is forthcoming yet, at the same time, innately distant to the viewer.

Pick up a limited edition print on Etsy.

(via futurecapetown)

pdsmith: ‘How many years does New York have before it starts to look like Blade Runner?’ “As crowded as the city feels at times, the present-day Manhattan population, 1.6 million, is nowhere near what it once was. In 1910, a staggering 2.3 million people crowded the borough, mostly in tenement buildings. It was a time before zoning, when roughly 90,000 windowless rooms were available for rent, and a recent immigrant might share a few hundred square feet with as many as 10 people. At that time, the Lower East Side was one of the most crowded places on the planet, according to demographers. Even as recently as 1950, the Manhattan of West Side Story was denser than today, with a population of two million.” Full story: “How Many People Can Manhattan Hold?” (NYT) [via @urbandata]

pdsmith:

‘How many years does New York have before it starts to look like Blade Runner?’

“As crowded as the city feels at times, the present-day Manhattan population, 1.6 million, is nowhere near what it once was. In 1910, a staggering 2.3 million people crowded the borough, mostly in tenement buildings. It was a time before zoning, when roughly 90,000 windowless rooms were available for rent, and a recent immigrant might share a few hundred square feet with as many as 10 people. At that time, the Lower East Side was one of the most crowded places on the planet, according to demographers. Even as recently as 1950, the Manhattan of West Side Story was denser than today, with a population of two million.”

Full story: “How Many People Can Manhattan Hold?” (NYT) [via @urbandata]

urbangreens: Submission from evigglade.blogspot: Vertical wall,  Musee du Quai Branly - in Paris Great shot! I haven’t seen too many images of the museum from this angle & distance

urbangreens:

Submission from evigglade.blogspot:

Vertical wall,  Musee du Quai Branly - in Paris

Great shot! I haven’t seen too many images of the museum from this angle & distance

llysakowski: Eric Fischer’s beautiful data visualization map of the Bay Area. Eric is plotting Flickr photos on a map and highlighting 50 major cities in a vector view. The different colors represent different modes of transportation: Black is walking (less than 7mph), Red is bicycling or equivalent speed (less than 19mph), Blue is motor vehicles on normal roads (less than 43mph); Green is freeways or rapid transit.  Photos by Eric Fischer

llysakowski:

Eric Fischer’s beautiful data visualization map of the Bay Area. Eric is plotting Flickr photos on a map and highlighting 50 major cities in a vector view. The different colors represent different modes of transportation: Black is walking (less than 7mph), Red is bicycling or equivalent speed (less than 19mph), Blue is motor vehicles on normal roads (less than 43mph); Green is freeways or rapid transit. 

Photos by Eric Fischer

(Source: blog.flickr.net)

spatialforces: Unplanned: Research and Experiments at the Urban Scale “Just as the discipline of architecture faces a re-imagination of itself in this era of slow-motion global capitalism, the human population finds itself crossing the threshold to a predominantly urban existence.  Many of the basic tenets underpinning urban planning – Cartesian geometry, programmatic taxonomy, contextualism – have been subject to skeptical investigation and rebellion in architecture throughout the past decade. Yet conventional urban planning continues, the discipline of urban planning operating much as it has since the 1960s (if not the 1860s). Leveraging an interdisciplinary focus, UNPLANNED: RESEARCH AND EXPERIMENTS AT THE URBAN SCALE boldly presents a collection of radical methods for envisioning and producing space at the urban scale.” …

spatialforces:

Unplanned: Research and Experiments at the Urban Scale

“Just as the discipline of architecture faces a re-imagination of itself in this era of slow-motion global capitalism, the human population finds itself crossing the threshold to a predominantly urban existence.  Many of the basic tenets underpinning urban planning – Cartesian geometry, programmatic taxonomy, contextualism – have been subject to skeptical investigation and rebellion in architecture throughout the past decade. Yet conventional urban planning continues, the discipline of urban planning operating much as it has since the 1960s (if not the 1860s). Leveraging an interdisciplinary focus, UNPLANNED: RESEARCH AND EXPERIMENTS AT THE URBAN SCALE boldly presents a collection of radical methods for envisioning and producing space at the urban scale.”

…

hedonisticsustainability: Tokyo, Japan — Deciduous vines provide this building with summer shade, and winter sun; reducing energy demands, while contributing to bird habitat and urban green.

hedonisticsustainability:

Tokyo, Japan — Deciduous vines provide this building with summer shade, and winter sun; reducing energy demands, while contributing to bird habitat and urban green.

(Source: tokyogreenspace.com)