Urbanism

UR{BNE} Films is an urban design and architecture film festival, coming up in Brisbane this May and in London this June! The main intention behind this very interesting project is to showcase films that inform and inspire about urban design, architecture, public spaces and collaborative design process, where communities and city design can be the subject, the background, the actor and lead role in the wide mixture of feature films, documentary and shorts… ...

For their experimental visual project Stenop.es, Paris-based photographers Romain Alary and Antoine Levi are just using a primitive technique: The Camera Obscura, a pinhole camera… Two layers are merging while the landscapes takes place in the interior’s intimacy. The idea is as simple as it is ingenious. All they have to do to create such an pinhole camera apartment is to entirely darken a room (probably using some kind of transparency) and adding a tiny pinhole to one of the windows. The result is an upside-down projection of the real world taking place everywhere inside, creating that astonishing effect of merging the outside landscape with the indoor space. ...

Last weekend several thousand people (including many Guy Fawkes) protested against ACTA not just in Berlin. Of course I joined the demonstration in my city due to the fact that ACTA violates my opinion about how internet culture should work… Anti ACTA means Pro Internet *Since Spring 2007, 39 countries (27 member states of the European Union, the United States, Japan, Canada, South Korea, Australia, México as well as a few other countries) negotiated in secret a trade agreement aimed at enforcing copyright and tackling counterfeited goods: ACTA. Leaked documents show that one of the major goal of the treaty is to force signatory countries into implementing anti file-sharing policies under the form of strong criminal sanctions. ...

About 2500 old NYC subway cars, including 1000 so-called Redbirds, have been buried about 80 feet underwater off the US east coast during the last years, as the Spiegel recently published! After running round about 40 years in one of the world’s largest subway networks, this is their last stop… Redbirds - Anti-Graffiti Subway The Redbirds, which are named after their cinnabar red anti-graffiti coat of paint and got famous during the early 1980th, when New York Cities graffiti scene reached the peak, are now helping to create an artificial reef off the coast of Delaware (named Redbirds Reef), what sounds really weird in my ears… ...

In 1929, Johnny Weissmuller, an Austrian-Hungarian-born American swimmer and actor best known for playing Tarzan in movies, inaugurated the Piscine Molitor (also known as the Piscines Auteuil-Molitor or the Grands établissements balnéaires d’Auteuil) swimming pool in Paris (what is why I call it Tarzan’s swimming pool). As well as the beautiful La Jarry, this wonderful Art Deco building, which hosted the popular introduction of the bikini by Louis Réard in 1946, is planned to be destroyed in 2012! ...

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. ...

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… ...

Augmented Reality is a trendsetting modern technology which has been permanently further developed in the last years. Now there’s a first iPhone app which allows augmented reality tagging the streets: Adorn everything and anything, even those buildings you never thought possible to tag. (about Street Tag) Street Tag turns your iPhone into a spray-can and makes it not just possible for you to virtually spray-paint walls in real time without fearing arrest, but also to share and showcase your tagged walls with others! The highlight: Due to geo-tagging technology and its augmented reality feature, the Street Tag app enables others to see your artworks at the exact place you painted them… ...

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! ...

Hamburg-based Spacedepartment is, after Gaffa-Urbanism and Copy & Paste, right now planning the next Urban Spacemag issue (number 4!), for what reason they are calling loud and far for your ideas, texts, questions, images, diagrams, stories and opinions! This issues main topic is Ego-Urbanism. You know it’s about questions like who is positioning opinions in public urban space, how much power one single person has in the urban environment or which different interests in urban space exist. ...