cities
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The 6 most awesome telephone pole signs
Smart humans lighten up their nabes with funny phone pole signs. Herewith, our favorites from the internet.
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First-graders protest Starbucks to save local coffee shop
Back in 2011, a tragedy of epic proportions struck the East Village: Starbucks moved in. And not only did it move in, it kicked a beloved local coffee shop, The Bean, out of its flagship location. Even non-coffee drinking elementary school students were outraged, as Majorie Ingall discovered: Here we have a piece of paper […]
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Ithaca mayor turns his personal parking space into a mini-park
The 25-year-old mayor gave up his car to join the 15 percent of his city's residents who walk to work.
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You can identify poor neighborhoods from space
Tim De Chant at Per Square Mile has noted that rich urban areas have way, way more trees than poor areas in the same city. In fact, the difference is so stark that income inequality can be seen from space. The satellite images above are low-income West Oakland and high-income Piedmont, and I probably don’t […]
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Creepy-cool village where every house is a musical instrument
The Music Box is a New Orleans art installation that makes regular artist’s colonies look like Camazotz. In this tiny shantytown, every building is also a musical instrument, and the entire town can be played in a beautiful, spooky symphony that looks and sounds like something out of Coraline.
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Mesmerizing data visualization shows a day in the life of a city’s bike usage
[vimeo 40866482] This video is probably what Ralph Steadman sees when he takes half a tab of acid and looks at a map of Budapest, but it’s also a data visualization of the city’s bike usage during a 24-hour period. The size, location, and direction of the bubbles reflect how many people are on bikes at […]
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Brooklynites distribute handmade artisanal parking tickets
Woe betide you if you decide to drive your ironic vintage Yugo in Brooklyn instead of your fixed-gear bike with detachable mustache. Park Slope residents have had enough of those bullshit half-spaces that show up in front of cars when someone moves an SUV and it gets replaced by a compact. They’re so pissed off, […]
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City-dwellers’ allergies are so bad because they don’t have enough bacteria
This allergy season has been terrible. It seems like everyone I know has been running around with leaky eyes, even those of us who aren’t typically pollen-sensitive. Granted, there was an unusual amount of tree sperm in the air this year, but it seemed strange that everybody — really, everybody! — was afflicted. But a […]
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Awesome cityscapes made from discarded textbooks
What do you do with unwanted textbooks? Chinese artist Liu Wei makes spectacular carved-book cityscapes.