Anything I can find I'll try to blog about it, be it GIS, mapping, programming, graphics, CAD, networking, gadgets, music, both in English and Arabic.
Technically everything tech-related and tech-unrelated.
"The Downtown Eastside is the oldest neighbourhood in Vancouver; it is also the most run-down.
It is striking that the history of the Downtown Eastside began in destruction and disappearance. In 1886, soon after the city was incorporated, the Great Vancouver Fire swept down on the neighbourhood and razed almost all of it to the ground. The video installation Fire with Fire recalls this troubled period of Vancouver’s history. It also alludes to the neighbourhood’s present conditions by reminding us that many lives have been consumed there, worn down by years of homelessness, drug use, street prostitution, and violence."
The main point here is how the artist thought of the fire itself as part of the history of the neighborhood. It was created using 3 blu-ray players and 3 projectors.
"Hand From Above encourages us to question our normal routine when we often find ourselves rushing from one destination to another. Inspired by Land of the Giants and Goliath, we are reminded of mythical stories by mischievously unleashing a giant hand from the BBC Big Screen. Passers by will be playfully transformed. What if humans weren’t on top of the food chain?
Unsuspecting pedestrians will be tickled, stretched, flicked or removed entirely in real-time by a giant deity."
I love the idea of thinking that there is some entity that will eat pedestrians in real-time in from of them :-D
Urban Cursor is a GPS enabled object designed to facilitate social interaction and play in public space.
The object, which is shaped as an oversized 3-dimensional computer cursor (pointer), was placed on a square in Figueres, Catalunya during the cultural festival Ingràvid.
For me ... this is a very smart way to have a space identity ... and the link between the computer world to the space where the object is hosted is very pleasant.
I Am The City was recorded on May 8 1982. It remained unreleased until it was included on the compilation album "More Abba Gold" in May 1993.
This was one of 7 songs Abba recorded during 1982 for their possible next album after The Visitors, believed likely to be called Opus 10.
The 7 songs were Should I Laugh Or Cry (Sep 1981), You Owe Me One, I Am The City, Just Like That (all May 1982), Cassandra, Under Attack and The Day Before You Came (all August 1982).
However the group unofficially retired at the end of 1982, and the unfinished album was never completed. The unreleased songs eventually appeared as bonus tracks on The Visitors album or on compilation albums.
There has been no definitive reason given for the group's retirement in December 1982. However there is no doubt that the two divorces had taken its toll on the group. Their hearts were no longer in it. During their career they had often said "Abba will carry on as long as we enjoy working together. The day that we are tired of it, we'll stop."
The group's break-up was further hastened by Benny and Bjorn's collaboration with Tim Rice in early 1983 to write songs for the new musical project Chess. The four Swedes were no longer looking in the same direction, it was time to go their separate ways.
This is an unofficial promotional video made in 2007 for this song.
Lyrics:
Coming through a cloud, you're looking at me from above
And I'm a revelation, spreading out before your eyes
And you find me beautiful and irresistible
A giant creature that forever seems to grow in size,
And you feel a strange attraction,
Ooh, ooh the air is vibrant and electrified,
Welcome to me, here I am my arms are open wide
Somewhere in the middle of the never ending noise,
There is a pulse, a steady rhythm of a heart that beats
And a million voices blend into a single voice,
And you can hear it in the clamor of the crowded streets,
People come and take their chances,
Ooh, ooh, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose a lot
Come make your own contribution to this melting pot
I'm the street you walk, the language you talk
I am the city, the skyline is me and the energy
I am the city, the famous hotels
And the cocktail bars, and the funny smells
And the turmoil of cars, and the people
The air that you're breathing is me,
Yes I am the city, you let me be
People feed me with their lives, I am a hungry soul
And they all worship me, and pay their homage day and night
Everyday I hear a lot of tired, shuffling feet
But come tonight they will be dancing in the neon light,
Dazzled by the crazy magic,
Ooh, ooh, they're grabbing pieces of the fatted calf
And in the wind if you listen hard, you'll hear me laugh
I'm the street you walk, the language you talk
I am the city, the skyline is me and the energy
I am the city, the famous hotels
And the cocktail bars, and the funny smells
And the turmoil of cars, and the people
The parks and the squares that you see,
All the sounds that you hear,
And the air that you're breathing is me,
Yes I am the city, you let me be
I am the city, you let me be, I am the city
The famous hotels and the cocktail bars,
And the funny smells and the turmoil of cars,
And the people, the air that you're breathing is me
Coming through a cloud, you're looking at me from above
And I'm a revelation, spreading out before your eyes
I'm the street you walk, the language you talk
I am the city yes, I am the city, you let me be
And you find me beautiful and irresistible,
A giant creature that forever seems to grow in size,
The skyline is me and the energy,
I am the city you let me be
Somewhere in the middle of the never ending noise,
There is a pulse, a steady rhythm of a heart that beats
I'm the street you walk, the language you talk
I am the city, yes I am the city, you let me be
And a million voices blend into a single voice,
And you can hear it in the clamor of the crowded streets,
The skyline is me, and the energy
I am the city you let me be.
In the last few years we have seen the trend of BIM (Building Information Modeling) where a building is represented using real-world entities instead of a bunch of lines.
This trend is now making a shift in the way architects present their ideas and interact with their models (using software like Autodesk Revit, ArchiCAD and Vectorworks instead of AutoCAD and Bentley Microstation).
BIM would be a great answer for Architects.
But more recently a new term was coined, CIM or the City Information model, which aims to transform the urban planners way of handling their plans just like architects.
Some little known applications has started to explore the concept of modeling the whole urban environment and how much information can we extract from such model, in essence how the model would reveal relationships previously little known to the planner or very complex to map such relationships.
CityCAD CityCAD from the British Holistic City Software aims to become the city planners main tool (where they previously relied on GIS systems, AutoCAD drawings or even paper maps and census tables).
See CityCAD Software: Stop Masterplanning! (from The Pop-Up City) and Visualizing and Analyzing Plans with CityCAD (from Planetizen).
CityCAD as a software is more into the space and green planning paradigm, and is currently less into the social, socioeconomic and demographic aspects of the city, but quite frankly these are very complex subjects that need much more research on how to model them and how to turn such issues into solvable questions that a model (and the dataset that we feed into that model) can answer.
CityEngine CityEngine from Procedural is more into visualizing the 3D city than assisting in the city planning tasks, but a city-optimized visualization tool is very beneficial to urban planners and would bring the city planners some part of the technology that they always wanted, that to visualize the city's current state to better understand it visually, and to visualize the post-plan state that represents their work (to analyze the plan visually).
See New York City In 2259 (from The Pop-Up City).
Some very irrelative point I like about CityEngine is that it uses the Eclipse RCP Platform (which I like but have nothing to do with the software itself).
Other attempts
Maybe one of the older attempts is the The Open Planning Project, it tries to use the Open Source model to create a community of contributers to create an open solution for city planning.
But this list is very incomplete and doesn't touch on the positive aspects of using a systematic way on handling city planning tasks verses the negative impacts using a limited mindset system to solve a very open-ended problem, and the subject needs many more posts other than this one.
