If a city could be one’s soulmate, Melbourne would be mine.
I cannot get enough of how artistic and cultured Melbourne is—definitely chicken soup for the creative soul.
View original post 546 more words
Melbourne and art
Reply
Monthly Archives: May 2015
Shephard Fairey in Detroit: Stenciling and Spraying. Detroit, Michigan, USA.
Shephard Fairey (if you don’t know who he is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_Fairey) is in Detroit for a nine day residency. He was to have started a mural on the side of One Campus Martius, but the weather was not cooperating–it rained.
Not one to be deterred, Fairey and his assistants worked inside in the middle of parking structure Z. It seems appropriate–or it just me?
http://www.freep.com/story/entertainment/arts/2015/05/16/shepherd-fairey-detroit-mural/27459223/
Hawt Damn! That’s Fierce.
Detroit is trying to revitalize their downtown using street art. They have had 36 well-known (I have no idea how they judged that) artist come to town to do murals in the last two years.
The information came out of an article in the Detroit Free Press
Dérive: Situationist International Architecture & the Modern City
Gentrification has given Brooklyn a beautiful makeover, but under the surface lies the ugly problem of homelessness. It’s now the least affordable borough due to gentrification and its hostile takeover of Brooklyn neighborhoods is pushing the poor out on the streets while giving the rich a new territory.
Homelessness is a citywide concern, with 60,484 people sleeping in New York City shelters each night, according to the Coalition for the Homeless. The city is trying to provide apartments with New York City Housing Connect, a portal where users can apply for affordable units throughout the city. However, the number of apartments available greatly outnumbers the amount of applications. As noted in a New York Times article, it was mentioned that a building in Brooklyn at 59 Frost Street had 38 affordable apartments, but received over 80,000 applications for those units.
With the number of people without a home at…
View original post 2,093 more words
Television Review: Daredevil’s first season explores the human costs of gentrification
“This is my city” – Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk, at various points in Daredevil’s first season.
The battle between Daredevil and Wilson Fisk is a battle for Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan, and what each of them perceives to be the ‘soul’ of the city. Wilson Fisk, Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson all grew up in Hell’s kitchen, and from what we see in the first season of Daredevil (mainly through flashbacks), it wasn’t a great place to live. But it’s home. Matt Murdock, Foggy Nelson and Wilson Fisk all want the same thing; to rid their home of crime and make it a great place for future generations to grow up. For our heroes, this means using the law to try and protect people like Mrs Cardenas from being forced out of their rent-controlled apartments (and Matt beating up bad guys by night). For Fisk, it means getting rid of those…
View original post 1,082 more words
Cumbernauld – the Worst Place Ever Planned
Glorious urban failures provide us with excellent opportunities to learn and understand mistaken urban planning concepts and their consequences. This post focuses on one of the more dramatic urban failures, which happened to take place in Britain.
After the second world war, the modernistic approach to architecture and urban planning took hold. While many Europeans countries did not build as much as less developed countries after the war, they still managed to build extensively, and especially Britain. Following the New Towns Act of 1946, the British government promoted the development of tens of new towns in the 1950s and 1960s – probably the worst period of town planning in the West and maybe even the entire world throughout history. On top of all the crappy cities built in Britain during this period, Cumbernauld shines the brightest (or gloomiest). Cumbernauld was established during the 1950s as an independent town north east…
View original post 552 more words
High Rising — Architecture, Urbanism, and the Cinema
AprilisNational Landscape Architecture Month. This got me thinking about an idea for a piece but, as often happens, I found myself tumbling down a rabbit hole of research tangents and decided I’d start with a post about architecture of the non-landscape variety. Apparently there is no “National Architecture Month” and Los Angles proclaimed October “Architecture Month” but, well, whatever.
I’m sure that lots of kids played with blocks, in sandboxes, had Erector sets, &c but I don’t recall every hearing anyone speak of architects with the same reverence they did pop stars, actors, and professional athletes. My siblings and I enjoyed construction toys like Capsela, Lincoln Logs, Legos, and I had some sort of castle building brick set too. I also used to also draw blue prints for imaginary dream homes. I dug a moat for Castle Greyskull near the gully because it seemed like a better…
View original post 1,715 more words
Classification Territories and Arts of Resistance in the Urban Space
Author: Aliki Kylika
By 2050 65-75% of the world population will live in cities.[1] As more people are gathered in the urban centres, the urban borders are infinitely expanded transforming the shape of the cities and of the surrounding countryside. In this expansion people are the absolute necessity for the city’s viability, but despite this fact they are not necessarily participant in the design of the urban space. A number of surveys and workshops are claiming to take into consideration the wishes of the local residents in the process of redeveloping each area, but the jargon, the phrasing and the structuring of these surveys raise questions on how much of their content is grasped. The whole process of extracting conclusions from such classification surveys is highly questionable, as it seems that they can easily be manipulated towards the speculations of local authorities and financial investors.
The viability of each urban…
View original post 1,089 more words
urbanculturalstudies 