Professional planners, urban designers, and architects (this is our own Ken Snyder working on a comprehensive plan project in Shreveport) are typically much less ethnically diverse than the communities they work with.
Grist explores the lack of people of color as professionals in the fields of planning, urban design, and architecture, and what that means for community design processes (h/t to Planetizen).
Metaio has a new video showing some impressive improvements in their augmented reality engine, most notably with “3D markerless tracking,” aka real-time orientation of the mobile device. The original videos illustrating the technology were very cool but were shot in a controlled lab environment. That’s not true here.
Artist Candy Chang is at it again with another “Before I Die” interactive art installation, this time in London. We love this.
This is cool: a diversity of Swedish citizens each get to tweet under the @Sweden handle for a week at a time: “Every week, someone in Sweden is @Sweden: sole ruler of the world’s most democratic Twitter account.” Time and others have reported on this.
This is dated but we stumbled across it recently … a performance-based approach to community engagement on land use and urban design issues in Portland by the Sojourn Theater.
Here’s a new tool in Washington state for helping voters sort through issues, discuss and deliberate about them with other voters, and identify points of agreement and potential compromise (h/t to Jon Stahl’s Journal).
TheCityFix describes a photo- and art-based project aiming to engage younger community members in a rethinking of public transit.
We’ve started thinking about ways Pinterest (which is experiencing spectacular user growth and now drives more referral traffic on the web than Google+, YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn combined) could be helpful in community engagement efforts. Its ease of use and its deeply viral dynamics may make it a really useful tool for collecting and sharing images. The Museum of the Future and Quicksprout each have some nice summaries of potential uses. Don’t be misled by their focus on museums and marketing, respectively … many of their suggestions apply more broadly.
The New York Times takes a stab at a mildly interactive data visualization of the President’s 2013 budget proposal.
EngagingCities reports on a new study by the Corporation for National and Community Service exploring internet use for civic life across generations.
In a separate post, EngagingCities reflects on “the democratization of mapmaking” and some of the implications for civic participation.
EngagingCities (which ties for the ‘most mentions’ award this week) also describes the growing momentum around the idea and emerging field of geodesign.
Digital Urban has three posts that we spent some time with, as well: one offering a first look at the new CityEngine and an integration with Lumion (which collectively they call “a game changer”), a more detailed look at the CityEngine and Lumion combination, and a third demonstrating live 3D Kinect-based streaming.
California Common Sense launched a new civic engagement website focused on state policy and financial issues, providing background on issues, soliciting opinions, and sharing those opinions with elected officials (h/t to Gov 2.0 Watch).
And on the PlaceMatters blog we posted a rundown of some easy rules for screwing up your public process.
What did we miss?
2 Comments
That Metaio’s Augmented City with 3D marker less tracking video was just brilliant! Thanks
Thanks for the comment, Kevin. I think we’re going to see huge leaps in AR technology implementations over the next year or two … I imagine it will penetrate every field where making it easy for people to imagine something different than what’s there now.