The public artworks in this gallery make one wonder what the artists had to go through for these pieces to see the light of day. Some are silly, others are tasteless, and a few are downright genius, and they all add a sense of whimsy and wonder to an otherwise sterile urban cityscape.

Take your eyes on a stroll through the gallery of images at the link below, then tell me what you would think about having crazy artworks like these on display in your town.

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It’s funny how much personality you can add to inanimate objects simply by attaching a pair of cartoon eyes. Cookie monster trash cans, hungry trash cans, bashful locked outlets, Timm Schneider’s street art would be a pleasure to come across in the urban jungle.

Link –via Laughing Squid

Russia seems like a chaotic place to live, with giant pigeons lurking around every corner, blighted urban landscapes full of dogs getting it on, and an extremely diverse citizenry trying their best to act like nothing’s wrong.

These photos capture a side of Russia few outside the country ever get to see, and each image has an interesting story to tell.

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Portuguese born street artist Vhils has an original vision of what urban development really means, and he travels the globe exposing what’s beneath the surface of city walls .

Using various tools to dig, drill, scrape and otherwise remove sections of masonry, he reveals the images hidden behind the smooth walls, and the results are nothing less than spectacular. He should call his style of art urban erosion sculpture!

“This excavation, often a process of violent removal, stands in sharp contrast to the delicate portraits discovered hidden underneath.”

Can you dig it?

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During two expeditions on Friday, adventurous eaters, amateur botanists, and a handful of curious locals descended on the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood of the Nation’s Capital in search of edible plants and wild foods with the renowned forager, ‘Wild Man’ Steve Brill. Our tour, co-hosted by Roadside Food Projects, Atlas Obscura, and Think Local First D.C., covered all of one block. But the number of foods we found, many of which were weeds you’d walk by without a second glance, didn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the available bounty growing between the city’s streets.

Read about the safari and the things they found at Atlas Obscura. Link

(Image credit: Dallas Lillich)

Photographer Richard Calmes takes glorious pictures of professional dancers in flight. This photograph (which took many attempts to achieve the result) is from the gallery entitled Beautiful Dancers on the Town. Link to gallery. Link to artist’s site. -via Everlasting Blort

Buildings are creatively converted or utterly demolished all the time to make room for highways and other large-scale civic problems, but the laws vary on what can be done when a single hold-out structure stands alone against a sea of fat-cat developers, builders and architects who all want nothing more but for them to move.

Sometimes they successfully force out residents or bribe them with offers that range up to 20 times the value of the home and real estate – but in many cases they simply have to give up and build around them, creating so-called ‘nail houses’ that stand apart from their surroundings.

In some cases, these incredible stand-alone structures have huge fan bases of individuals who applaud their willingness to stand up for their property.

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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.

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