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As a by-product of my research projects, I sometimes come across great conceptual experiments that use contemporary ingredients and new methodologies in innovative set ups. 'Learn Do Share' is the account of such an unusual experiment: DIY Days NYC was an interactive conference with workshops at the beginning of the year....[read more]

There were a few things FCT team member Gareth Pearson knew he wanted to see during his recent visit to San Francisco. Food trucks, parklets, and some urban farming projects. He thought he would have to hunt them down, but was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon them by chance. Here he shares the first of a few highlights from his...[read more]

To students of urbanism the familiar story has been told over and over: post-WWII flight from the cities to the suburbs altered how American’s lived - generally from living “outside” your home to a more secluded, private interior sanctuary.[read more]

Crowdsourced placemaking had been a private sector sponsored success in Bristol, CT, but what about coming from the public sector? To many, public sector sponsored crowdsourced placemaking sounded rather impossible, with such arguments as: - A municipality doesn’t do placemaking, or implementation, the private sector does. It’s the...[read more]

Books still carry an aura of mistic knowledge only accessible to whom dares to move beyond the cover and through the sea of pages with waves of sentences down to the discovery of words. There is only little the outsider can understand from a distance, it remains a mystery. The best way to share the reading experience is by swapping and passing on books. It is more than a gift if a read book is shared it is a way of sharing the experience of the story and getting to know what someone else already knows.[read more]

Network structure varies across cities. This variation may yield important knowledge about how the internal structure of the city affects its performance. …These results suggest that larger cities are physically more inter-connected.[read more]

The Rise of the Social Food Truck  via visualoop:[read more]

For urbanists, Google+ allows us to create an “Urbanist” circle to share our links, ideas and discussions on cities and placemaking without boring our non-urban friends and family.[read more]

According to various sources, the online social network Facebook is not all about fun and games anymore. Property owners in default on their mortgage could be served through Facebook. According to Time magazine, the "Facebook foreclosure" is coming soon to a financially discouraged neighborhood near you. Short term installment loans...[read more]

Credit: © REBARThought the movement to reclaim city streets was over? Think again. From their studios in San Francisco’s Mission District, the REBAR design collective is churning out interactive, site-specific design interventions that have begun to trigger serious transformations of urban environments, within the United States and...[read more]

Getting around in cities all over the world has remained relatively the same over the last half a century: we get picked up by buses or subway cars and, after a few stops and the inevitable delay, we disembark and step onto well-stamped concrete or pavement. The evolution of public transportation -outside of the meteoric rise of information technology- has been a boring, straight line, but the systems themselves, those systems cannot be reduced to linear conclusions.[read more]

The discussion around the subjectivity of mapping and the potential of subjective mapping tools becoming possible with the ever greater penetration of gadgets an locative media is gaining momentum. There are a number of project focusing on the output of individual mapping outputs specifically conditioning the visuals to the location,...[read more]