Category: land use

  • Mapping Racial Diversity

    Serendipitously continuing on the topic of mapping, some interesting ones (spotted on Seattle’s Publicola) offers many color-coded maps of racial diversity from major US cities. The work is from a familiar name, Eric Fischer (an earlier post showing some of his work is here), and he has developed another comprehensive set of urban maps highlighting…

  • Working the Line

    My current (re)fascination with the Center for Land Use Interpretation involves getting up to date on their latest events (as well as tearing through their bookstore and grabbing some gems to dig through – reviews/info coming soon). A recent announcement caught my eye. The ideas of margins and borders is constantly fascinating, along with the…

  • Building Better Burbs

    Check out the finalists for the Build a Better Burb competition. Not that Long Island is your typical burb, but some interesting ideas to chew on. Also available is voting on the finalists for People’s Choice Award.

  • Portland Photographic Record – Places

    A completely different scale from the concentrated landmarks – and perhaps the antidote to the over-documented – comes from the great Portland Grid Project a photographic essay of the city using a loose framework of grid points in which photographers are unleashed to document the ‘other’ places in the community. The plan, photographers are directed…

  • Portland Photographic Record – Landmarks

    The ubiquitous nature of digital data offers unique opportunities to display data about places that tells us a much richer story about ourselves than the actual city. Case in point, spotted via A Daily Dose of Architecture – are these ‘Geotaggers’ World Atlas‘ maps generated from geographically tagged data of uploaded photos to popular image…

  • Ephemeral Urban Gardens: Installations

    Examples of ephemeral productive agricultural landscapes give an indication of the possibilities of occupation of urban sites for education and growing food. LAND GRAB CITYA recent installation called Landgrab City as part of the Shenzhen & Hong Kong bi-city Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture. Designers Joseph Grima, Jeffrey Johnson and José Esparza have created a farm in…

  • Ephemeral Urban Gardens: Temporality + Mobility

    The last remnants of ephemera sitting around the archives is under the auspices of terrestrially based gardens within the foodsheds of our cities, and – and the need to address the issues of permanence (both the pros and cons). One option is to incorporate food production within our permanent landscaping by using the principles of…

  • Vertical Agriculture (Back to Earth)

    Digging through the archives based on the last couple of posts, I was definitely struck by the myriad shapes and sizes that these vertical farming proposals take and the overall excitement that has grown in a short amount of time. This caused me to want to dissect them a bit further in terms of form…

  • Urban Crude

    One the most fascinating passages of the book ‘The Infrastructural City’ was the chapter on oil production that still existed in a variety of forms throughout the urban form. The fabulous Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) has done some investigations, which are captured on a post in the Places portion of the Design Observer…