"Tekeli-li, or Hollow Earth Lives": A huge (comprehensive?) annotated bibliography of Antarctic and hollow earth fiction. Wow. (Thanks, Jonah!)
"The rarity of this opportunity to purchase a Le Corbusier duplex apartment cannot be over-estimated.": But does it have a roof garden?
Jane Jacobs, RIP: (I was going to try to make a "Death and Life of Great American Urban Theorists" joke, but she lived in Toronto for years.) A giant of her field -- if she had lived twenty years earlier than she actually did, America's great cities might be even greater.
The lost towns of New York: Upstate villages, flooded for New York City's watershed. (via ThingsMagazine.net)
The Neighborhood Project: Map sites are the current hotness for tinkering hobby-type websites.
Baltimore - 'Home of 1,000 slogans': Mobtown, represent!
A Boom Giveth, and It Taketh Away: Stories of gentrification in the neighborhood that used to be Shaw.
Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab Perfume Oils: Wanderlust: "Whitechapel: A gentlemen's blend, possessed of dignity, charm, and refinement, but in truth masking a corrupted, hideous, soulless core." Also: Neo-Tokyo, Gomorrah, R'lyeh.
All about the Montreal Metro: Some fascinating stories about the Montreal Metro today, and how the choices made 40 years ago are playing out.
For sale: Giant British underground bunker: “It was like a set from The Avengers,” said Nick McCamley, author of Secret Underground Cities, who lived locally and first discovered the existence of the site in the 1960s.
Malls of America: "Vintage photos of lost Shopping Malls of the '60s & '70s."
John Mage, "An Homage to Walter Benjamin: Arcades, Barricades and Public Sex": An article about the lost final work of one of the great philosophers of the twentieth century, who killed himself upon being turned over to the Gestapo sixty-five years ago last week.
Heritage USA: Exploring the corpse of Jim Bakker's Christian theme park/resort.
The Dark Magic of Oil Sands: Greenhouse gases, boomtowns, the Anglophone Saudi Arabia, and really big trucks: "Their tires, weighing 40,000 pounds each, are 14 feet tall, and you have to climb two flights of stairs to reach the driver's seat."
motelsign.com: The neon highway glow of vanished days.
Mostar, Bosnia, erects statue honoring Bruce Lee: Muslim or Orthodox, Serb or Croat, everyone loves to watch Bruce Lee open up a can of whup-ass. (via Hit and Run)
We the Peoples: 50 Communities Awards: Sustainable developments, humanitarian activists, poverty amelioration: the UN identified 50 cities and movements in the world of note.
Auroville, a hippie intentional community in India: "Today Auroville is recognised as the first and only internationally endorsed ongoing experiment in human unity and transformation of consciousness..." (via, tangentially, Jim Henley)
Where did people move after Floyd hit?: And what will this teach us about New Orleans?
Medieval Boston: What did Boston look like before the urban renewal of the '50s and '60s?
The Politics of Water: A blog devoted to the fight (internationally and in the American West) over the scarce but crucial resource that's -not- oil.
Dublin's 'Millenium Spike': What is the Irish tourist attraction really for? "There is a MASSIVE amount of energy being harnessed by it, absolutely MASSIVE."
Small-town claims to fame: From the "Farm Toy Capital of the Word" to "Spamtown USA". (via Making Light)
Cities Losing People After '90s Influx: The Census Bureau finds that the long-running move towards American suburbanization has picked up steam again.
The Historic Chicago Bungalow Association: Everything you need to research and restore your historic Chicago bungalow. Assuming you have one.
The Cincinnati Subway System: Abandoned during the Depression and now relegated to the ashheap of history. (via Things Magazine)
Modern Cleveland: Come along on a tour of Cleveland's secret treasures -- things with character and style, and that engender a sense of culture and community.
Baishawan: The jungle-covered remnants of a futuristic community in Taiwan; reminiscent of "The Prisoner"'s Portmeirion after WWIII.
The Rise of the Ephemeral City: "Unlike the imperial capital, which administered a vast empire and extracted riches from it, or the commercial city, which thrived by trading goods, the ephemeral city prospers by providing an alternative lifestyle to a small sector of society."
The Starbucks effect and highway planning: What happens when a significant proportion of the nation's commuters need to stop and get their morning latte?
Correcting the "Crimeogenic" Crowd: City Comforts responds to a Reason hit piece on the New Urbanism.
Have a baby, get a bonus: The Italian hamlet of Laviano fights to keep from turning into a boar-laden ghost town.
Witold Rybczynski on Celebration, Florida: He manages to make Disney's suburb look appealing and sound non-Orwellian.
Whispering imps on magic posters: Boy, the motif was absolutely everywhere. (via Waxy)
How far would you go for a piece of real estate?: One man's two-year-quest for a cheap Brooklyn building took him to Spain, cost him his girlfriend, and made him a burglar.
Fort Lauderdale tops list of code violators in crackdown: The city was the #1 violator in its own sweep of housing code violations, largely thanks to city-owned empty lots.
Hans Monderman rethinks road design: The Dutchman believes that reducing all the normal guides to behavior improves safety and says his roads have never had a fatality.
Hans Monderman rethinks road design: The Dutchman believes that reducing all the normal guides to behavior improves safety and says his roads have never had a fatality.
Green Roof Blocks: "Simply set them in place and your green roof is complete."
The Map Room: A Weblog About Maps: "Anything that fits under that rubric, from medieval mapae mundi to satellite imagery, and from topo maps to Tolkien, is fair game."
Beach Pneumatic: Alfred Beach's Pneumatic Subway and the beginnings of rapid transit in New York
Green Homes in Chicago: Some nice showcase work being done by green architects in the Windy City. (PDF) (via Treehugger)
The Century Building: 1892 - 2004: They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.
Hiddenbrooke, a planned community inspired by Thomas Kinkade: Oh my heavens. The painter of life licenses his name to a suburban development, which then makes things even worse. (via)
Hiddenbrooke, a planned community inspired by Thomas Kinkade: Oh my heavens. The painter of life licenses his name to a suburban development, which then makes things even worse. (via)
Wired Words: Utopia, Revolution, and the History of Electronic Highways: Cable t.v. was supposed to kick off the long boom in 1971.
Town-walking robot stencil: Holy crow, is this a gorgeous project. A graffiti flipbook of a man/robot walking integrates into the city around it. (via)
The Nine Nations of North America: So dated, and yet so topical.
The return of Ms. Subway: Hopefully they will bring back Miss Rheingold next.
It's the end of the world as we know it: As envisioned by the Photoshopping gang at Worth1000. (The Golden Gate Bridge is particularly nice.) (via)
DC Treemap: A tool from the Casey Endowment for mapping the surprising number of urban trees in Washington.
Lost destinations: Urban ruins. Suburban ruins. Plane graveyards and abandoned New Jersey dinner theaters.
Airline logos: I found myself admiring the AeroMexico logo while stuck on a runway. (via)
Expedition to an abandoned hopsital: Creepy shots of Broadview Center State Hospital. (Warning: Cheesy MP3s and work unsafe graphics elsewhere on the site.)
Joy in Mudville: Julian Sanchez on Robert Nozick, Temporary Autonomous Zones, and (sigh) Phish.
I knew him when!: My friend Drew's photos of the DC Metro system have been highlighted by DCist, the atrociously-named Gothamist spinoff. (Dig around and find pictures of me!)
The medal winners in Olympic design: A handful of excellent decorative and functional designs from the Olympics, most especially including Otl Aicher's 1972 sports pictograms. (see also) (via)
"There are six known different hyperspace library models or 'Omni Dimensional Networks', all of which can be used for data compression or different learning modes.": "Isn't 'Meaningless information' a contradiction in terms ?." Read about Autosophy's revolutionary technology and decide for yourself!
Lost Brooklyn: Pieces of Brooklyn that have been withering since the Dodgers left.
The journalist of the new suburbs: "'Minorities and immigrants are no longer the "others" in northern New Jersey,' Llorente says. 'They -are- northern New Jersey.'"
Mythical Geography: For sale: Maps of explorers' and cartographers' honest mistakes. (via)
Satan's Laundromat and the Abandoned Subway: Sounds like a children's book, looks like a million bucks.
Pirate flags: Calico Jack Rackham may have died like a dog, but he had the closest thing to the iconic skull and crossbones flag. (via)
City without people: A daguerrotype stripped out moving images leaving a ghostly, empty city and one lone shoeshine boy. (via)
Anil Dash on leaving New York: "And having extraordinary people adding their energy to the city seemed like the most that could be done to honor its spirit. All I was trying to give back was people I cared about, who I knew would love the city the way I do."
Planet of slums: "[C]ities will account for all future world population growth, which is expected to peak at about 10 billion in 2050.... Residents of slums constitute a staggering 78.2 per cent of the urban population of the least developed countries and fully a third of the global urban population." (via)
Maps of Trajan's Rome: From Empire to Collesium. (via)
The transformation of Cabrini Green: Will a community arise from the ashes of America's most notorious housing project? (Don't forget Bugmenot for the Tribune's login.) (via)
Condos, gated communities, and shadow governments: A libertarian considers the problems of semi-voluntary associations.
The American Highway Project: Photos documenting a lost America.
William Tozier's bibliophilic expidition: 1 minivan, 1000 miles, 2000 pounds of books. Also, mummies.
What mysterious events led the Maya to leave Lorain, Ohio?: On migration, abandonment, and the dangers of seeking a simple answer to anything. (via)
All about riding the Underground: "When we finally started moving again, the driver says over the tannoy, 'This is a customer announcement, please note that the big slidy things are the doors, the big slidy things are the doors'." (via)
Skate deterrents: Skateboarding is not a crime; it's an excuse to put annoying plastic geegaws over the entire landscape.
Optical concrete: See shadows through your cinder blocks.
Bloomsday 100: Thousands of tourists will converge on Dublin today to drink Guiness, feed kidneys to the cat, get rocks chucked at them, and masturbate. Ah, literature!
The Jews of Dublin: Leonard Bloom's kin are slowly disappearing.
The architecture of Wal-Mart: "The biggest buildings most people routinely visit are not Skidmore, Owings & Merrill skyscrapers; they're Wal-Marts." (via)
Walking is for Communistic one-worlders: If John Galt were in charge of urban planning, he, too, would make sure that there were no neighborhood markets or six-block walks. (via)
The serial montage and the myth of communicative transcendence: Part of a site dedicated to "the semiotics of advertising".
The farms of Detroit: "Hayfields, mistaken for 'ghetto grass,; have been mowed down by the Department of Public Works just as they are ready to be cut and baled." Detroit -is- the post-apocalyptic future.
The worlds are dust: Abandoned mining town on the Nambian Diamond Coast -- the houses are empty except for the dunes...
Kitchens of the Future: "Her declaration that 'this kitchen doesn't need a woman' captures a central theme of this paper." An astoundingly great linkdump from Anne Galloway.
The Illustrated Invisible Cities: Despina can be reached in two ways: by ship or by camel. The city displays one face to the traveler arriving overland and a different one to him who arrives by sea.
Gunkanjima: Battleship Island, an abandoned artificial island and coal mining town off the coast of Japan. (via)
Inhabiting the Automobile: "Automobility is in some respects a source of freedom, the 'freedom of the road'." (via)
Kitsch and Kalashnikov: Afghan wars, Afghan rugs: "Early pictorial, or 'aksi', war carpets are a fascinating hybrid of traditional abstract motifs slowly transforming into military objects. Where one might expect to find a 'boteh' symbol (an ancient precursor to our paisley), one finds instead a woman in a burka beside a tiny Kalashnikov rifle -- or a view from the ground of a B-52 unloading its deadly cargo." (via)
Famous unsolved codes and ciphers: From the Indus Valley to Bedford County, 4000 years of untranslatable messages.
New England Ruins: Something there is that doesn't love a wall. (via)
Deconstructing Ira: Ira Glass, Steven Berlin Johnson, Todd Haynes, and the Brown semiotics mafia
The demise of the loft as a meaningful cultural icon: "Why not? There's no frame of reference out here." (via)
Howard Besser's T-Shirt Database: Man oh man, is this thing cool.
Bob Stupak and Me: One man's experience with the life's work of Bob Stupak, the Strip's sketchiest casino owner.
Cuyagoa County planning blog: What Cleveland's zoning and city planning folk are thinking about -- I wish more government offices did this sort of thing.
The history of street names in America: How we got from "Church Street" to "Fox Run Drive"
The Bellagio goes dark: There's a hole in the lightbulb extravaganza of the Strip. (via)
The return of the Buffalo Commons: "The experiment on much of the northern Plains with European agricultural settlement may soon be ending..."
Homesteading returns: Free land can be yours if you're willing to live in a miniscule town in rural Kansas.
Pigeon Grove, TN: Druggie skulls! Buford Pusser's death car! Bear pits! Bunnyland golf! The musical world of Anita Bryant! This is truly a terrible, wonderful place.
America's favorite cities: I'm sure it's a fine place to live, but who the hell wants to -visit- Phoenix?
Dense suburbs in suburban California: The unstated assumption is that living close to your neighbors is something that needs to be explained. (via)
Mars, or, Misunderstanding: A masterful account of Helene Smith (the Medium from Mars), her Martial exploits, and alien walk-ins today.
Orkut map: Wow. That's an impressive visualization tool, and it might theoretically be useful. (via)
Mapping the Iowa caucuses: Proportional scaled -and- multivariable! Ooh!
The end of public space: The zoning-inspired giveback plazas of New York City (via)