Flâneuse urbaine / Urban flâneuse

GREENING THE CITY:  Street trees have a multitude of environmental and social benefits, begging the question of which cities have the greenest streets. As reported by Fergus O’Sullivan in CityLab (4 January 2017), MIT’s Senseable City Lab is pushing toward an answer to this question with a new project called Treepedia. 

A map website that catalogues the density of the tree canopy in 10 global cities, Treepedia uses information from Google Street View to create what it calls the Green View Index—a rating that quantifies how green a street view looks according to the number of trees it contains.

Rating a huge number of street corners for the relative greenery of their appearance, Treepedia also allows browsers to click on a series of dots that reveal street view images of the location in question. The result is one of the most detailed catalogs of urban greenery available.

For anyone who loves to explore the texture of cities, the maps are certainly an engaging browse—and that engagement is the point. The project’s overarching goal is to make issues of urban and environmental planning (and the data that underpins them) more accessible for non- or semi- professionals.

New ROA in Bangkok.

Brand new work by friend, co-misfit and brilliant artist ROA (Previously on Supersonic) in Bangkok, Thailand for the BUKRUK Urban Arts Festival.  ROA, who incorporates only local wildlife into his paintings for each location, chose to paint two elephants balancing on one another.

MICRO-APARTMENTS:  Utopia or distopia? 

Long prohibited by municipal codes, recent shifts in housing policy have allowed tiny micro-apartments of roughly 250-350 square feet to appear in urban markets. As Kriston Capps reports in City Lab:

“11 different micro-apartment developments in the works, according to a report from Curbed, from the Ivy Lofts in Houston to the Patterson Mansion in Washington, D.C. Or put another way, there are a dozen new apartment buildings headed for markets where some buyers or renters appear to want to live in them.”

Apartment size has long been an issue. Under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York City waived a zoning rule that apartments at least be 400 square feet in size. A pilot program to build prefabricated micro-housing in the city features units between 250 to 350 square feet with market-rate rents up to $3,000 per month.

Even though a market exists for micro-apartments in many dense urban cores,  main opposition often now comes from other residents. Owners and other rents  sometimes dread that micro-units will displace family housing, that young renters will overwhelm available infrastructure, or even—as The Atlantic suggested in 2013—that micro-housing poses a health risk to inhabitants.

Capps argues, however, that the “scaled-down units are neither a utopia nor a dystopia. In fact, they expand housing options across many demographics.”

B. Werber (via l-eau-vive)

Claude Monet became obsessed with the water lilies of his garden in Giverny since 1889. They became the subject of nearly all of his works in the last thirty years of his life, completing over 250 paintings of the water lilies. They were painted in different lighting conditions during the day as well as different seasons provided by French weather. 

It was during this time in his life that Monet was suffering from cataracts which affected what his saw and inevitably what he painted. After surgery to address his cataracts, it has been suggested that Monet was then able to see ultraviolet rays not usually perceived by the human eye which had then changed the colours he saw.

what transportation planners think about when walking around cities.