Goodbye to the Edge City
I’m totally in love with Tara McPherson
“above the fifth floor of all housing in England and Wales a minority of children are white. Most children growing up in the tower blocks of London and Birmingham - the majority of children ‘living in the sky’ in Britain - are black.”
— Prof Danny Dorling, Observer, September 25 2005
“Trident, rather than a thriving British electronics industry producing Ekco mobile phones, Marconi Playstations and PyePods, is the real legacy of the Dare generation, a bloated, useless monster, rooted in the fantasy that Britain is still a world power. We could have used our brains to produce Braun, but instead we ended up with antisocial welfare cases like BAE Systems and BNFL. Grant Morrison’s 1990 satire of Dan Dare, in which an aged and bitter Dare sees his legacy betrayed by a Thatcher-analogue prime minister called Gloria Munday, was spot on.”
— Review of Dan Dare and the Birth of Hi-Tech Britain, at Science Museum, by William Wiles, from  Icon Eye

Thames Gateway

From http://www.chora.org/2005/?page_id=44 

“The Thames Gateway is a complex urban field. It is 9 times the size of Barcelona, has the same population as Berlin and the equivalent density to Los Angeles. It is replete with polluted industrial sites interspersed within its unique marshland ecology.”

Fascinating recontextualisation by Chora. 

London: a Life in Maps
Skyline review

An overview of the Phoenix Tower market.

One day, all cities will have these sort of data, dynamically mapping the strata of office letting.

Mapping the city vertically, as well as horizontally.

 

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy adventure game
Original HHGTTG adventure game, playable online.  Recently discovered is some of the source code of the proposed follow-up, Milliways.

Remapping London

Instead of mapping the physicalities of London, we should map it’s processes.

We should map it’s flows and patterns, it’s trajectories and vectors. We should trace the movement of people, the ebb of capital, the flow of information.

The map will define the territory. 

WeWorkForThem™
Great stuff over at WWFT, as usual
“I pick up my pen. It flows. A building appears. There it is. There is nothing more to say.”
— Oscar Niemeyer