CARTOGRAPHY AT IT'S BEST

stamen design is a San Francisco based design and technology studio which designed for example archinects cover page. Very interesting are their amazing mapping projects, including crime mapping or mapping photos on flickr.com. For seeing Invisible Dynamics take a look on Cabspotting. Using GPS technology for tracking cabs creates a living and always-changing map of city life in San Francisco.


For constructing your own map of Manhattan go for Transparent New York. Do Manhattan's historic districts correlate at all to the island's original farm plots? How many office buildings are constructed in the last 10 years compared to post-war period? All that you can see there.



Fake is the New Real (what a name!) offers a broad range of new cartography and taxonomy ideas. For example Chicago Mile by Mile (image above) maps every intersection of the city's mile streets through photography. And finally the best: How long have I been waiting for that? A comparison of more than 30 city's subways at scale. Could somebody please compare the track length of those networks, now that we know that San Francisco's BART is covering a huge area, and Tokyo's network expands not so much as expected, and Bejing's looks like a piece of minimal art. Bravo! subways at scale

thanks to where for this incredible mapping links

EARTH WITHOUT PEOPLE

The movie I Am Legend recently satisfied the curiosity of what would happen if mankind vanished from our planet. With incredibly appealing images the movie creates a New York absent of people proliferated by nature. This takes us to Alan Weisman's book The World Without Us published last summer.

The following timeline of post-human New York below is taken out of the same author's article from discover magazine which was the initiator for his book

If humans were to vanish from New York, how soon would nature take over? Scientists predict that within . .

• 10 years Sidewalks crack and weeds invade. Hawks and falcons flourish, as do feral cats and dogs. The rat population, deprived of human garbage, crashes. Cockroaches, which thrive in warm buildings, disappear. Cultivated carrots, cabbages, broccoli, and brussels sprouts revert to their wild ancestors.

• 20 years Water-soaked steel columns supporting subway tunnels corrode and buckle. Bears and wolves invade Central Park.

• 50 years Concrete chunks tumble from buildings, whose steel foundations begin to crumble. Indian Point nuclear reactors leak radioactivity into the Hudson River.

• 100 years Oaks and maples re-cover the land.

• 300 years Most bridges collapse.

• 1,000 years Hell Gate Bridge, built to bring the railroad across the East River, finally falls.

• 10,000 years Indian Point nuclear reactors continue to leak radioactivity into the Hudson River.

• 20,000 years Glaciers move relentlessly across the island of Manhattan and its environs, scraping the landscape clean.

Speculations about the future in the movie seem to be partly realistic. Certain aspects will happen also from a scientific point of view. Nevertheless the situation in the movie, which should draw an image after 3 years is drastically overdone. understandable, due to the fascinating effects we wouldn`t have liked to have missed.

URBAN DEMOLITION

please click the image to activate

Even though we all know it already: Berlin is one of the most interesting and unique sites in terms of history and city development. But still - this animation makes even the most hard-boiled berlin expert realize the bandwidth of berlins urban tragedy (and great opportunity!).

check this out!

URBAN GROWTH

Urban Planet is a collection of features on urbanisation from the BBC News. It includes an interactive map that tracks the growth of the world’s largest cities , ...
as well as comparisons of the environmental effects of urban and rural life. Unfortunately the last update was half a year ago.

GARBAGE

And still Naples is suffocating in garbage. Since by the end of last year the last landfill of campania was shut down by the Camorra it got even worse. In the streets of Naples 4000 tons of garbage are waiting to be picked up, in the whole region since Christmas 100000 tons where left in the streets. While official Italy is concerned about their image, the inhabitants of the region start to burn their problem. Politicians are negotiating with Switzerland and Germany to transport the garbage up north. How many trucks of garbage would that be!?

Take a tour through current Naples:

WORLD'S BEST URBAN SPACES AND PLACES

Inspired by digital urban's World's Worst Urban Spaces and Places idea, city of sound calls for entries for the best urban spaces, again on a Flickr pool. We are excited how both will develop. But don't forget to review the 'preamble', before you upload your favorites. When described why this particular place or space, be it a bench or the famous Centre Pompidou, the project will get really interesting.

goto Flickr's World's Best Urban Places and Spaces

TBILISI POSTAPOCALYPTIC

History and its impact make Tbilisi to a unique field of investigation for a variety of metropolitan problems and questions. The tension between economic and political interest and both the impact of the Soviet past and recent increase of corruption make the capital of Georgia appear in an interesting light. After many years of economic depression, the city developed slowly but steadily to an "active" capital of the country. After the end of the Soviet Union, most of all the former CIS countries were affected by poverty and political isolation. During the 90s the city suffered from extremely high unemployment, emigration and shrinkage. In the last years a reversal trend can be noted. Foreign investors have discovered the town, trade begins to grow dramatically. Tbilisi gains population again. While more and more European cities are affected by shrinkage, it seems as though Tbilisi is now trying to fix its literally rusted infrastructures. The time after the apocalypse has begun.

This rapid growth is marked by the lack of an overall strategy and a missing large-scale development plan. Institutionalized monitoring is simply not existing. The property market fills the longterm building-gaps again. New infrastructures emerge, while the old ones tumbledown at the same time. Cities like Shanghai go to great lengths to keep everything controlled and organized, Tbilisi lets itself be taken over by self-organisation.

Tbilisi post-apocalyptic.

Georgian real estate business in general and the one in Tbilisi in particular have more or less stabilized in the last five years. The prices have doubled and the demand for properties is much higher than supply.
While the economic descent of Georgia in the early 90's, building activity got postponed and construction sites rotted. People tried to sell their property to use the proceeds for a better life somewhere else. Since the turn of the millennium, however, this situation appears to be stabilizing. Many people, particularly those employed in international companies, are now in a position to buy land and real estate. At the same time economic refugees from the 90's return to Georgia and are in the position to invest. Recently billboards around the city as well as the official statistics indicate a huge construction boom. According to these numbers, the expenditure in the construction sector doubled in the years from 2000 to 2004 to 370.4 million lari (200 million US $). From 2004 to 2005 they increased to 606.2 million lari (330 million US $). In the same period 800 projects were under construction, 62% residential buildings.
In 2000 the price per square meter was less than $ 250, now it is between 800 $ and 900 $. In prestigious elite districts prizes go up to $ 1500. Apartments and office space are mostly sold long before completion of the building.

This makes Tbilisi an efficient place for large scale investments and developments.
The Center Point Group, for example, founded in 1999, has a market share of 75%, and sees himself as the leader in Tbilisi`s real estate market. In this position they can choose their customers. while only those with regulated and stable income are considered to buy or rent space. The subsistence level in Georgia is around 200 lari (110 $) per month, but at least twice is needed to be credit worthy.
The Center Point Group is cooperating for some time with the TBC-Bank, the market leader in the Georgian Chen banking sector. Together they award 20-year mortgage loans with 13-17% annual interest. The real estate group Arci also started a cooperation with the Bank of Georgia, the second largest bank in the country. They sell on credit with 16% annual interest. about 70% of new homes in Tbilisi are “'funded” in this manner.

Live webcam of building site here