• An Interactive Journey Through New York’s Roofscape Makeover – Technology – The Atlantic Cities

  More like this!
  QUOTE
  Most visitors to New York City crane their necks for a view of the city’s famous skyline, but locals know better: to get the best views, you have to go up. Here’s your chance to take a rare – and vivid – journey atop a few of the city’s billion square feet of rooftops.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: roofs nyc atlantic_cities video

• The Right Way to Engage Residents in a Neighborhood Redesign – Housing – The Atlantic Cities

  “Cultural Audit”: a useful way to get stakeholder buy-in?
  QUOTE
  Perhaps the most innovative undertaking was a “cultural audit,” which Mithun describes as “a methodology of documentation and rigor that uses interview, survey, and in-depth market analysis to provide a contextual community snapshot.” The audit, based on open-ended interviews with residents of and visitors to the neighborhood, produced a summary of community opinion with regard to services and features needed (60 percent mentioned locally owned businesses or youth care and activities), aspirations for the future (31 percent want to “maintain residents, culture and neighborhood feel”), transportation and safety, what makes the community special (42 percent: people), shopping habits and preferences, economic and financial issues, and more. These findings became the basis for all that followed.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: mithun urban_renewal redevelopment atlantic_cities community

• Evgeny Morozov: The IGod: Steve Jobs’s Pursuit Of Perfection—and The Consequences. | The New Republic

  This is such a good article. Morozov’s dissection of the influence of The Bauhaus on Jobs/ Apple makes it worth reading, but then there are also bits like the one below, about *space*:
  QUOTE
  The idea of the Internet is still too young to produce strong anti-app sentiment. We do not yet have an adequate understanding of cyberspace as space. While it is safe to speculate that different design arrangements of the online world give rise to different aesthetic experiences, we still do not know the exact nature of this relationship. Nor do we know enough about how the design and the interconnection of online platforms affect the distribution of civic virtues—solidarity, equality, and flânerie, to name just a few—that we may wish to promote online. Just as we recognized many of the important civic functions of the sidewalk only after it had been replaced by the highway, so we may currently be blind to those virtues of the Internet—its inefficiency, its unpredictability, its disorder—that may ultimately produce a civic and aesthetic experience that is superior to the “automatic, effortless, and seamless” (one of Apple’s advertising slogans) world of the app.

  The point is not that we should forever cling to the shape and the format of the Internet as it exists today. It is that we should (to borrow Apple’s favorite phrase) “think different” and pay attention to the aesthetic and civic externalities of the app economy. Our choice is between erecting a virtual Portland or sleepwalking into a virtual Dallas. But Apple under Steve Jobs consistently refused to recognize that there is something valuable to the Web that it may be destroying. Jobs’s own views on the Internet stand in stark contrast to how he thought about the washing machine. (…)
  (…)
  Standing back and getting out of the way and letting things take on a life of their own is not a variety of moral reflection, though it makes sense as a way to think about a wildly successful product. The total and exclusive focus on the tool at the expense of its ecosystem, the appeal to the zeitgeist that downplays the producer’s own role in shaping it (“whatever happens is … ”; “feeling the direction”), the invocation of the idea that technology is autonomous (“these things take on a life of their own”)—these are all elements of a worldview that Lewis Mumford, in criticizing the small-mindedness of those who were promoting car-only travel in the 1950s, dubbed “the bankruptcy of social imagination.”
  UNQUOTE

  tags: steve_jobs evgeny_morozov socialcritique bauhaus design

• On the Right Track on Vimeo

  Great video from Portland’s Mayor’s Office on bicycle infrastructure, with Catherine Ciarlo, Transportation Policy Director explaining things.

  tags: bicycles cycling infrastructure portland video vimeo reference

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted: 06|10|12 at 11:26 am. Filed under: links.

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