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Channel: Magic Blue Smoke » Urbanism
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Excellent Shard InfoGraphic

As a followup to my post a couple weeks ago about the Shard, here’s an excellent infographic about the structure. The expected residential sale price is 5,000 GBP per square foot. To put that in...

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A city in a city in a country in a country

I’ve recently been reading Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography. It’s an excellent overview of the history of London, as told through a series of small historical essays. One of the most interesting...

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The City is stronger than any one man’s meddling

It never ceases to amaze me that the people who are in charge of “planning” cities usually harbor a secret mistrust if not outright hatred for the city. They explicitly craft policies to try and...

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I would buy the shit out of one of these

This is the Hiriko, a foldable, electric, solar-assisted car for urban environments, developed by a team at MIT in cooperation with a consortium of partners. Here’s a good article on the vehicle and...

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London: The Biography: The Review

I recently finished Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography. The book takes an interesting approach to the subject of London by presenting the user discrete views onto London. Each chapter turns the...

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A Little Meditative Urbanism for You

Kuala Lumpur DAY-NIGHT from Rob Whitworth on Vimeo. I love urban architecture, I think, in much the way that devout Christians love the architecture of Cathedrals. Skyscrapers and vast urban warrens...

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A Surprising Collection of Bad Thinking

As a libertarian Urbanist, I have a love/hate relationship with the Atlantic Cities blog. On the one hand, it does often alert me to interesting new urban developments or deliver me my daily dose of...

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Beat Patrolling Seattle

I’m reading a very interesting book by Peter Hitchens about the history of modern policing in Britain. The book is called The Abolition of Liberty and it focuses primarily on the differences from early...

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And a ridiculously awesome new urban sport was born…

A Frenchmen tries to race a subway train between two adjacent stops. I’ve often wondered about this in London. Some of the tube stops in London are close enough together that it’s possible to...

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A Lunchtime Adventure in Practical Urbanism

I love living in a city. I had four hours of phone screens this morning (by the way, my team is hiring) so afterwards, I went for a wander to stretch my legs. In the span of 45 minutes, I discovered...

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One heartbeat of the City

This represents the trips of the 3.1 million transit riders in Greater London, on Wednesday, 11 May, 2011: Bluer pixels represent riders inferred to be at home, redder pixels are riders at their...

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Will There Always Be A Tube Map?

Matt Brown, writing at the excellent Londonist blog, dares to ask the question: Rather than continuing to update the increasingly cluttered Tube map, might we one day ditch it entirely? Could a...

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Will There Always Be A Tube Map?

Matt Brown, writing at the excellent Londonist blog, dares to ask the question: Rather than continuing to update the increasingly cluttered Tube map, might we one day ditch it entirely? Could a...

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Skywalk-loving Libertarian Urbanist Smash!

Literally everything about this article infuriates me. Skywalks are badass. One of the very few things that Spokane (my former home) does right that every other city fucks up is its downtown skywalk...

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On Tourists

I’ve never totally understood the loathing that many residents of Great Cities bear towards tourists. Most residents of DC, NYC, London, etc. bear a dislike for tourists on a level usually reserved for...

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Urban Kaleidoscope

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The PNW and the UN Fallacy

Anyone interested in an object illustration of the UN Fallacy1 could hardly do better than Vancouver, BC and Seattle, WA. Seattle and Vancouver are so similar in culture, climate, architecture, arts,...

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XBox, Occupy Free Time

So between visiting my folks over a few glorious, fun, relaxing days over the holiday, then working part of the weekend, and now getting both an XBox One and a Playstation 4 on the same day, the amount...

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“When you’re tired of London, you’re tired of life”

Restless Nights from Paul Richardson on Vimeo. Fullscreen and cranked headphones highly recommended.

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Some Random Links

From the U. S. Census comes this fun little NCAA-brack-style game where you have to rank U. S. Metro Areas by population. On my first go I got 54 right, which seems pretty good. Some of smaller metro...

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