Little bits and pieces that have been sitting in a draft post for a while.

3191, a year of evenings Portland, ME and Portland, OR seem to attract similar people. The types of emotions and images they evoke can be similar too. I would like to see a pairing of Miami and Vancouver, or London and Istanbul, or Manhattan and Shanghai. Perhaps also Flagstaff, AZ and Avignon, France. Ottowa and Izmir. Helsinki and Kyoto. Halifax, Canada and Cork, Ireland.

Beautiful object all made of useful parts, each doing its own thing. All alone up there, being beautiful. I want a continuous video feed of this thing turning in the sun, projected onto my bedroom wall. With accompanying feed of charts and graphs showing the progress of each experiment. Not sure what this has to do with cities, except that it is inspirational.

Project for Public Spaces, a great resource. They are working for the future of cities as great places to live.

Background on why cities are greener from worldchanging. It seems that developing green cities and developing livable cities is often the same thing, whereas the opposite is true for low-density areas.

YES! I love cities at night, I have never been afraid walking around at 3am even in very “dangerous” areas. I fear rural areas at night, I grew up in a rural area and I know about the bad things that can happen. Jane Jacobs has a lot to say about how cities can be made safer at night, and it is mostly: put in more bars and all night establishments, spread them around the city. The polar opposite of most current city planning tendencies.

The Architecture of Fear is great to browse through, and is going in the sidebar.

Amazing art: Chiharu Shiota, 2008 work made of millions of black lines connecting things. Benjamin Edwards, digital city pieces… generated from user input or painted on canvas, and many other projects; a site worth lots of exploration.