Urban Planning & Street Art: A Creative Intersection

What happens when a city declares war on graffiti? That’s one of the questions, the documentary Between the Lines, a film about a group of Toronto street artists who find new meaning in their work as they defend it against Mayor Rob Ford’s War on Graffiti, is going to answer! As mentioned by thegridto.com, Toronto’s Mayor Ford is making sure that everyone knows that he hates graffiti and street art since he took office in late 2010: He’s since gone so far as to slap on the coveralls himself to power-blast it from the walls of the city and herald a new mobile app that lets Torontonians report what they deem to be unsightly scribbles and murals themselves. ...

The urban farming project Himmelbeet (sky patch) is currently planning an extensive roof-top garden over Berlin! On the top of a former multi-storey car park in Berlin-Wedding, the nonprofit project is going to open an open gardening zone as from May 2013… In addition to the crops a beekeeper will supervise beehives. Workshops, cultural events and a coffee shop will revive the environment. We take a stand for maintaining of regional varieties, and want to grow organically and by the principles of permaculture. Gardening will take place in mobile raised beds. In addition to the community garden space, it will be possible to lease an own bed for a season. (loosely translated) ...

Anna Borgman and Candy Lenk realized the installation Luftschloss (cloud castle) on Alice-Salomon-Square in Berlin-Hellersdorf. The temporary urban intervention is the result of the examination of the fragmentation and incompletion of the space and the disappointed hopes for permanence and wholeness. The installation is 2300 m³ in size and is divided into four phases, showing different stages of transformation… I really like the idea, but what’s even more interesting is to see the exaggerated carelessness of the pedestrians. It’s like nobody notices anything; no one questions the installation, or wonders about it. It’s unbelievable… ...

Is urban art influencing urban development and planning? How does creative street culture cause social restructuring? And does graffiti equal gentrification? With its new monthly Culture Talk series, the network for cultural development Platoon is going to discuss those and similar questions! Furthermore, the NGO for culture, art and communication is going to open the doors of its new headquarter in Berlin for the first time… Urban Art vs. Gentrification? The discussion about street art and graffiti triggering first beginnings of a gentrification process is not new, at least in Berlin. Nonetheless, almost everyone in town, being threatened by gentrificational impacts has a different opinion and blames someone else. Platoon is now going to bring together artists, scientists and scene players, who all are probably part of the extensive social, economical and cultural shiftings taking place here and elsewhere… ...

A few days ago, French urban hacktivist Florian Rivière (the guy who installed the fabulous advertising carousel earlier this year) did a Hack your city into a soccer field workshop in Berlin-Kreuzberg! Soccer is one of the basic ways to reclaim the street. But today cities prevent this practice to facilitate car movements and security. Games or sports are just allowed in specific places: soccer fields, golf courses, skateparks, basketball courts… everything is confined. The aim of this workshop is to look for interstitials urban space where we could play soccer wildly. Because play is a claim of freedom and city is a place for freedom. ...

I just read about the USA and their prison problems and first was quite flashed when I noticed that the State of New York is hoping to sell its old prisons, before I entirely thought about it… As the New York Times explains in their New York Has Some Prisons to Sell You article (which by the way reads like a property description), the ideal buyer is someone who craves space to spread out, and who does not mind a property that has had thousands of guests over the years, what made my day because including me I know several others who could use such huge urban places to transform them into architectural research centers (as BLDGBLOG describes), to create impressing exhibition spaces, urban art centers, youth clubs, etc. ...

I’m pretty sure, some of you already heard about the international Park(ing) Day, right?! The idea behind this interventional project is the create temporary parks throughout the cities around the world, but of course you can build those parks whenever you like… …like Joe Baldwin together with the Altgeld Sawyer Corner Farm did in Chicago back in 2011. For a few hours, he turned nearly an entire Logan Square street block into a 280 square meters urban park: ...

Should graffiti be preserved? In the case of Blek le Rat’s Madonna masterpiece in Leipzig, the city says yes and what begun back in the early 1990s as a true love story, has now become an original precedent! Several years ago, Blek le Rat - who nowadays is regarded as a stencil art pioneer - spray-painted a Woman with Child on an apartment building in Leipzig. He dedicated the Madonna to Sybille, the woman he was in love with. Today, they are already married for 20 years and the stencil art piece is still there and it will stay there for at least the next decades! ...

The Shard tower in London becomes more and more impressing. I remember standing at the foot of it back in 2010, when the ugly construction site just showed a massive concrete spear raising into the sky. Now, two years later, The Shard (also Shard London Bridge or Shard of Glass) proves it is worth being called Europe’s tallest building. With its irregular triangular shape architecture, the dominating glass facade and the viewing gallery and open-air observation deck on the 72nd floor, the 310 meters skyscraper is became another attraction in London after its completion in April. Paul Raftery, architectural photographer, and Dan Lowe, director, have recently collaborated to create a timelapse film showing the final weeks of construction of The Shard tower in London Bridge. It was shot over many days during the early months of 2012, from locations spanning from Greenwich Park to Hampstead Heath and simply impresses! ...

Top of Shard Tower The Shard Tower already dominates London’s skyline and will become Europe’s tallest building when construction work is finished. Nevertheless, some urban explorers (as you could already watch in the Crack The Surface documentary) entered the Shard’s construction site and took some astonishing photographs, as Sky News recently broadcasted… Urbex Photograph: Around the globe, urban explorers discover secret places, document decaying buildings or walk along subway tracks. If you’re interested in the resulting photographs, check out the Top Urban Exploration Photographers! ...