In The Urban Crisis: To celebrate the launch of its two new graduate programs focused on urban transformation, Parsons The New School for Design has organized In the Urban Crisis, a lecture series featuring leading voices shaping the global dialogue about city development. Organized by Miguel Robles-Duran, the series highlights core themes of the MS in Design and Urban Ecologies and MA in Theories of Urban Practice, both launching fall 2012, which explore the ways cities are shaped and reshaped through planning, public policy, development, and architecture.

All In The Urban Crisis events will be held at 6 p.m. in the Kellen Auditorium, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, 66 Fifth Avenue, and is free and open to the public. Speakers include: Continue reading

Designing Civic Encounter: Documents and Discussions on Urban Transformation in the Arab World curated and edited by Ursula Biemann and Shuruq Harb. Continue reading

[Figure 1. Scripted Space] The Scripted Spaces of Urban Ubiquitous Computing: The Experience, Poetics, and Politics of Public Scripted Space by Christian Ulrik Andersen & Søren Pold, Fibreculture Journal #19, 2011: Ubiquity:

The computer is moving out into physical and urban reality. Since Mark Weiser’s call for a ‘computer for the 21st century’ in 1991 a migration from the screen and the desktop towards integrating computers and networks into our surroundings has been a part of contemporary computer science research; for example, in augmented reality, ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), and pervasive computing. A number of technological developments (such as big screens, new smart materials, GPS, RFID tags, and ever faster and cheaper wireless networks) have helped carry the research agendas out into ordinary reality. Continue reading

Urban Research 2012 :: February 9–19, 2012 :: Directors Lounge, Naherholung Sternchen, Berolinastraße 7 Berlin / Mitte, Germany :: Open Call For Film And Video Works – Deadline: Dec 20, 2011.

The program Urban Research, curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr for Directors Lounge 2012, reaches beyond the genre “city films”. Contemporary artists are engaged in local politics, they are concerned with specific urban problems and developments, and they are directly interacting with the public with performances and public interventions. Continue reading

Social Cities of Tomorrow – International Conference: February 17, 2012 and Workshop: February 14-16, 2012 :: Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Our everyday lives are increasingly shaped by digital media technologies, from smart cards and intelligent GPS systems to social media and smartphones. How can we use digital media technologies to make our cities more social, rather than just more hi-tech?

This international conference brings together key thinkers and doers working in the fields of new media and urbanism. Keynote speakers such as Usman Haque, Natalie Jeremijenko will speak about the promises and challenges in this newly emerging and highly interdisciplinary field of urban design. Continue reading

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After a 10 month hiatus the SoundTransit project is back, hosted by Turbulence.org.

SoundTransit is a collaborative, online community dedicated to field recording and phonography. Phonography is the art of recording sounds from the environment around us, with an emphasis on the unintentional sounds which often go unnoticed in our daily lives. An international community of phonographers collect and share their recordings, with interests ranging from recordings of natural or urban environments to improvised situations or soundwalks, to the resonance of solid objects or the Earth’s atmosphere. Continue reading

Place Making and The Art of Engagement by Linda Carroli, ArtsHub, October 10, 2011:

Urban innovation can mean or refer to many things and there’s no shortage of ideas about how to make cities better. As the theory and more deterministic ‘forecasting’ goes, cities must get better if they are to foster and sustain the types of globalised knowledge and creative economies that will underwrite the future. However, there can be both disagreement and diversity in how to understand what better and development actually mean in and for the urban environments.

Two recent Australian publications reveal some of that diversity by presenting a series of case studies in community engagement, site specificity and place. Continue reading

“Boskoi is an application for Android mobiles that allows people to create a checklist of geo-localized spontaneous food in urban areas. Continue reading

The Rise of Performance Architecture: Camp-Conference on Art/Urban Strategies :: September 22 – October 1, 2011 :: Grisar Park, Brussels, Todays Art Festival.

“Accepting architecture as cultural production, its performative dimension must also contribute to a critical role, that is, to architecture’s capacity to produce commentary regarding the ongoing transformations of culture and society. In this sense, the notion of architectural performance implied here feeds directly upon the tradition of performance art.” — Pedro Gadanho, “Architecture as performance”, revista Dédalo N°2, Porto, 2007 Continue reading