Urban Culture: Exploring Street Art, Graffiti & More

I already heard a lot about wired urban sports, I mean there are people playing Capture the Flag in Berlin, some use their bikes to play polo and others run burning through the city, but I never saw someone freestyle skiing in an urban environment. Maybe that’s because we don’t have snow that often here in Berlin or - and that’s what I prefer as a good reason - pro-skier JP Auclair is really killing it! His piste is the City of Trail, a smaller village in British Columbia! ...

Urban Exploration Photography is the title of a nice lecture by Neil Ta and a great resource for UrbEx enthusiasts, exploring greenhorns and urban photography beginners! Urban Exploration, Best-Practices The free eBook from 2011, which is written by one of the top urban exploration photographers, gives not just some fantastic insights into this popular leisure-time activity by including dope photos of decaying and neglected buildings, rooftops and more, but also discusses interesting aspects like how and why people are willing to risk their lives by climbing through abandoned areas or why Urbex has a political dimension. ...

Analyzing next trends often is an act of trying to shape the future based on past experiences. For that reason it’s like a big lottery with an intended purpose - But an interesting one! Crowd-funded Urbanism and more… Jeroen Beekmans from The Pop-Up City recently started to publish a series of ten trends for 2012 when it comes to city culture, urban design, marketing and technology. The list includes interesting ideas like Crowd-Funded Urbanism or Urbanism Made To Like and phenomenons like The Revival Of Psychogeography just to name a few. ...

When I first wrote some lines about the Swiss artist driven Amateur Magazine a year ago I was keen about the high content and print quality of the around 100 pages magazine. Since then I’m well supplied with their issues and became a fan of their nice stories, great interviews and topical diversity. And that’s the reason for me to introduce the latest issue of this print publication to you as the first part of the announced Urban Art Books & Mags Special. ...

Berlin is a very dynamic city - everyone who already had the chance to come to this town knows that. To catch this flowing Berlin spirit and to deliver some brilliant impressions from the street of the German capital, Matthias Makarinus (who also did the abandoned places in Berlin series and captured the snow in Berlin) started to create a new and astonishing video 16 months ago! Dynamic light, clouds, street life, movement and much more. Shot from May 2010 - September 2011… ...

In my eyes one of the most interesting things about urban art is the internationalism, for what reason for me it’s the greatest happiness to get some insights into the street art culture in other countries and especially on other continents! Hence I really like this documentary about street art in Buenos Aires… Featuring several local artists with interviews, you can not just learn a lot about the Argentinian street art movement and how it broke out in 2001 due to financial crisis but also about José Carlos Martinat Mendoza, whose concept of art could easily be described as vandalizing the vandalized and whose story is a must to know! ...

Berlin is well-known for its abandoned places and for that reason a great playground for urban explorers! My first post about abandoned places in Berlin featured the old Bärenquell brewery in Schöneweide and the old ice fabric in Mitte. Today I’m going to introduce you to some other, decayed buildings in and around Berlin and a nice urban exploration blog… Abandoned Olympic Village Half of the village which was built for the 1936 Olympic Games near Berlin (Elstal, Wustermark) can still be visited (they other half was kept in good condition and is some kind of a museum nowadays) and although the trip takes some time it’s definitely worth to go! ...

Yesterday, July 16th, 2011 thousands of Berliners demonstrated, danced and raved again against gentrification and especially the so-called Mediaspree project in Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg! Also Urban Artcore teamed up with the crowd to protest against rising rents, luxury new buildings on former free spaces, ruthless investors and unsocial city politics… Mediaspree is one of the largest property investment projects in Berlin. It aims to establish telecommunication, media and fashion companies as well as hotels along a section of the banks of the river Spree as well as to implement an urban renewal of the surrounding area. But that’s against the will of the citizens who don’t want Berlin’s riverside becoming a luxury glass and concrete area like in London or Paris but keep at least the last available free spaces along the Spree! ...

A few weeks after the abandoned art festival at Artbase Grabowsee will have taken place near Berlin, this year’s IBUg festival of urban culture will take place in the West Saxon city of Meerane! IBUg2011 represents an urban culture event that aims at bringing graffiti, street-art and installations closer to the public by embracing existing architecture, and concurrently establishing it as an independent form of art. In addition, derelict industrial grounds are revived to improve people’s awareness for art, culture and architecture. (IBUg concept) ...

Urban Exploring | The catacombs under Paris are definitely worth a visit: Deep dark tunnels, skulls and Bones, legal and illegal clubs, graffiti, mural artworks and fire-breather - The Parisian underground is a living theme and exploring park for people (the so-called cataphiles) who want to dip into another, sometimes surreal world… Not long ago, the renowned National Geographic published a nice photo gallery of the catacombs and wrote: Paris has a deeper and stranger connection to its underground than almost any city, and that underground is one of the richest. The arteries and intestines of Paris, the hundreds of miles of tunnels that make up some of the oldest and densest subway and sewer networks in the world, are just the start of it. Under Paris there are spaces of all kinds: canals and reservoirs, crypts and bank vaults, wine cellars transformed into nightclubs and galleries. Most surprising of all are the carrières—the old limestone quarries that fan out in a deep and intricate web under many neighborhoods, mostly in the southern part of the metropolis. (Neil Shea, National Geographic) ...