Gedi is an abandoned city in Kenya that had a stone palace, several stone homes, and a mosque, with features such as a water system that put medieval Europe to shame. Relics from Europe and Asia have been found there, indicating global trade. The city had a population as high as 3,000 people at its height in the 13th century. But for some reason, the residents left and no one has lived there for hundreds of years. See lots more pictures of Gedi at Kuriositas. Link -via the Presurfer

(Image credit: Flickr user Viaggi Spensierati)

Ever had a fantasy to be like Godzilla?  Now you can play them out in an unusual installation by German street artist EVOL. This installation is a small city constructed at the average person’s height for an experience of seeming large. It took EVOL and his team eight days to excavate and install the city block. Check out the other photographs at Colossal, a great website for art and design.

Link

Panasonic has announced plans to create a green community for around 1000 residents, built from the ground up in Japan. The eco-friendly Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town should be available by 2018 and hopes to keep carbon output low.

Green building is certainly nothing new, but the thrust of Panasonic’s plan is to start from scratch rather than retrofit existing structures and communities with eco-friendly technologies. The idea is that existing technologies and town planning strategies can be brought together harmoniously from the start, for maximum effect and efficiency. And Fujisawa SST will have it all: a smart power grid; solar cells and batteries in every home; roads designed for bikes, walkers, and electric vehicles; networked public lighting, and more.

In the wake of the catastrophic earthquakes in Japan, the project has also taken on several aspects of disaster response. Fujisawa SST will boast self-sustaining power generation, as well as safety planning and mobility. And with so many devastated Japanese communities looking to rebuild, Fujisawa SST could be a blueprint to model their rebirth.

Link

Which cities in the United States have the most bookworms? Amazon has just announced a list of the Top 20 Most Well-Read Cities in America:

After compiling sales data of all book, magazine and newspaper sales in both print and Kindle format since Jan. 1, 2011, on a per capita basis in cities with more than 100,000 residents, the Top 20 Most Well-Read Cities are:

1. Cambridge, Mass.
2. Alexandria, Va.
3. Berkeley, Calif.
4. Ann Arbor, Mich.
5. Boulder, Colo.
6. Miami
7. Salt Lake City
8. Gainesville, Fla.
9. Seattle
10. Arlington, Va.
11. Knoxville, Tenn.
12. Orlando, Fla.
13. Pittsburgh
14. Washington, D.C.
15. Bellevue, Wash.
16. Columbia, S.C.
17. St. Louis, Mo.
18. Cincinnati
19. Portland, Ore.
20. Atlanta

A few more nifty details:

• Cambridge, Mass., ordered the most nonfiction books
• Boulder, Colo., ordered the most books in the Cooking, Food & Wine category
• Alexandria, Va., residents ordered the most children's books
• Miami, Gainesville, and Orlando topped the list of buying the most books from the Summer reading list

Is your city listed?

Get this: According to the 2010 Census report, ten of America’s 100 largest cities have names that starts with a “C”. How many can you name in five minutes? That’s the challenge of today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. I only got five of them (and would have never come up with the other five). Maybe you will get them all! Link

These two picture of the Bund in Shanghai show the growth of that part of the city in just  the last twenty years. Yes, although it may remind you of an early 20th-century photograph, the top picture was taken in 1990. The bottom picture was taken in 2010. According to a comment from a Shanghai redditor, this is an accurate depiction of the tremendous construction since then. Link

Have any of you been to the town of Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha! lately? It’s in Quebec. Link

Every city is different - New York and Los Angeles are night and day in terms of layout, population dynamics and economy - but are they similar enough that they can be described mathematically? Is there a set of physical equations to which all cities - from small towns to sprawling megalopolises - conform?

That's what physicist Geoffrey West wanted to find out:

“We spend all this time thinking about cities in terms of their local details, their restaurants and museums and weather,” West says. “I had this hunch that there was something more, that every city was also shaped by a set of hidden laws.”

After analyzing a lot of urban data, West and his colleague Luis Bettencourt discovered that cities are actually mathematical objects:

After two years of analysis, West and Bettencourt discovered that all of these urban variables could be described by a few exquisitely simple equations. For example, if they know the population of a metropolitan area in a given country, they can estimate, with approximately 85 percent accuracy, its average income and the dimensions of its sewer system. These are the laws, they say, that automatically emerge whenever people “agglomerate,” cramming themselves into apartment buildings and subway cars. It doesn’t matter if the place is Manhattan or Manhattan, Kan.: the urban patterns remain the same. West isn’t shy about describing the magnitude of this accomplishment. “What we found are the constants that describe every city,” he says. “I can take these laws and make precise predictions about the number of violent crimes and the surface area of roads in a city in Japan with 200,000 people. I don’t know anything about this city or even where it is or its history, but I can tell you all about it. And the reason I can do that is because every city is really the same.” After a pause, as if reflecting on his hyperbole, West adds: “Look, we all know that every city is unique. That’s all we talk about when we talk about cities, those things that make New York different from L.A., or Tokyo different from Albuquerque. But focusing on those differences misses the point. Sure, there are differences, but different from what? We’ve found the what.”

Link (Photo: Terabass [wikipedia])

Los Angeles-based artist Mike Kelley brought the bottle city of Kandor from the Superman comic series to life. If you don’t know, Kandor is a Kryptonian city miniaturized by Brainiac and kept in a bottle by Superman:

The exhibition of new works by Mike Kelley at the Jablonka Galerie features sculptures, lenticular lightboxes, and videos related to the fictional city of Kandor, the capitol of Superman’s home planet Krypton. According to the Superman mythos, Kandor is the only remaining vestige of the exploded Krypton, and the city is preserved, in a reduced state, in a bottle in Superman’s possession. Interestingly, the image of Kandor was never codified and the numerous representations of it in the comic book throughout the years vary widely in appearance. In this exhibition Kelley reconstructs ten unique versions of Kandor, with its enclosing bottle, which, despite obvious differences, purport to depict the same city.

John Struan over at Super Punch has more pics and a video clip from the
exhibit: Link – Thanks John!

Pixel City is a procedurally-generated city by Shamus Young. For the non-coders out there, this essentially means that based on a certain set of rules, a 3-D city is generated dynamically each time the program runs.

– via diskursdisko

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by diskursdisko.

Sitting at no. 3 is the place I used to live nearby, San Francisco:

Why You Should Live in San Francisco

San Francisco is a cityscape of irresistible drama. Steep hills and skyscrapers overlook a gorgeous bay that changes color with the sky. That drama filters into every aspect of the city’s life, from its topsy-turvy power politics to its go-hard recreation (3,480 acres of parks including three golf courses) and go-harder nightlife (including 2,870 bars). Since the days of the Barbary Coast, San Francisco has boasted one of the great bar and dining cultures, and is home to some of the best restaurants in North America, claiming one restaurant for every 279 people.

The louche life notwithstanding, San Francisco was the healthiest city in the U.S. in 2008, at least according to USA Today. Just outside the city lay miles of vineyards producing some of the world’s great wines. The city abounds with classic men’s stores including local favorites Cable Car Clothiers and The Hound. San Francisco is a creative sector powerhouse, with LucasArts located right in the city’s famed Presidio. The city’s boy-to-girl ratio (male: 51%; female: 49%) doesn’t seem promising at first, but remember this is San Francisco, so you can shave a good 8% to 10% off the competition right there. Be advised that women here are the cream of the brain trust — San Francisco was named one of the top 10 smartest cities by Forbes last year — so the kind of “hey baby” come-on that works in L.A. or Miami Beach ain’t gonna work here.

Link to the entire list (See if you agree with their no. 1 pick) – Thanks Daniel!

Link – via Diskursdisko

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by diskursdisko.

Update 3/5/09 by Alex – Fixed to point to original link

Inspired by a similar idea in Atlanta early last year, a writer left two disposable cameras on park benches in Brooklyn and Manhattan. With just a note telling people to take any photo they like and her hope that someone wouldn’t run away with the cameras she left them for the day.

On returning she found the cameras exactly as she’s left them, with no exposures left. The developed photographs are an interesting slice of city life across one day.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Jake.

Living in Las Vegas appeals more to men than women. Affluent adults are twice as likely as poorer folks to want to live in Boston. Young people like big cities such as New York and Los Angeles. More Americans would rather live in a place with more McDonald’s than one with more Starbucks.

Those are some of the findings of a Pew Research Center survey out today on where Americans would most like to live. Whether they favor cities, suburbs or the countryside, almost half wish they lived somewhere else, the report found. City dwellers are more likely to dream of living somewhere else, and men in rural areas are far happier living there than women.

"There are some more fundamental differences between men and women," says Rich Morin, senior editor of the Pew Research Center survey. "Different cities seem to appeal to different partisan ideological groups. … People who are drawn to cities are typically younger people."

Denver, San Diego and Seattle are the top picks of the 30 largest metropolitan areas. Denver is the favorite city among Republicans, and it also rates well with Democrats and independents.

Link – via The Zeray Gazette

So far, I’ve lived in 2 different countries and 5 different places, the latest of which is good ol’ Southern California … and I can’t wait to move away!

How about you? Where would you rather live and why?

Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it’s long been recognized that city life is exhausting — that’s why Picasso left Paris — this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.

"The mind is a limited machine,"says Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and lead author of a new study that measured the cognitive deficits caused by a short urban walk. "And we’re beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations."

One of the main forces at work is a stark lack of nature, which is surprisingly beneficial for the brain. Studies have demonstrated, for instance, that hospital patients recover more quickly when they can see trees from their windows, and that women living in public housing are better able to focus when their apartment overlooks a grassy courtyard. Even these fleeting glimpses of nature improve brain performance, it seems, because they provide a mental break from the urban roil.

Link