public_space - Yule Heibel on Diigo

08 May 09

Fairy tale or horror story - join the debate | RUDI - Resource for Urban Design Information

"Urban designer and artist collaborations: what value do they bring?"
QUOTE
The event did not focus on ‘how to do’ public art, but rather aimed to stimulate debate and throw up challenges to what some are coming to regard as a too-often standardised way of creating public spaces.
UNQUOTE

www.rudi.net/19698 - Preview

public_art artists urban_design collaboration public_space rudi

throw up challenges to what some are coming to regard as a too-often standardised way of creating public spaces
failed to evolve
- - then why should it be a solution to turn B. into a fantasy land instead? ...Not sure I understand why this should work. - on 2009-05-08
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- The Presence of Absence: Where are the people in public space?
  
  • What is the role of new technology?
  
  • Are we being isolated by the iPod culture?
  
  • Is it possible to plan in spontaneity?
  
  • If an art object is chosen for a place, who does it represent?
  
  Diarmaid Lawlor, associate director of Urban Initiatives, says that places should be ‘centres of collective meaning'.
- ‘I think one of the fundamental issues is that there is a rift between the concept of ‘professional' and that of ‘artist'. Not in the usual terms - artists can be professionals and behave accordingly but they are in particular professionally individual (maybe even professionally difficult).
  
  This has to accepted as a manageable risk, which perhaps could be dealt with by raising the game of the people who brief and commission the artist - to find a better fit,' she says.
  - - look to 4culture.org in Seattle; they've found ways to do this - on 2009-05-08
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- where public behaviour comes under strict scrutiny
  - - while I agree with the critique of the "malling" of public spaces (privatizing what were public spaces), I'm very very tired of the suggestion, hinted at in the highlighted phrase, that public behavior should be exempt from scrutiny or controls of any kind. If you think about it, the move to privatization could be seen as a *failure* of public will to regulate behavior in public spaces (examples: social disorder, public drunkenness & urination, hooliganism, vagrancy, aggressive panhandling, and so on). Too often (esp'y if you're living in a place that has a British flavor - either UK or Canada, eg.), there's a tendency to not be judgmental about social disorder, to be forever tolerant, to not complain, and so on. But people still react (are reactionary), so eventually they allow privatization as a way of "sterilizing" what they don't like about the public space. It's almost certainly dishonest - it would be better to have frank (even "judgmental") discussions about our urban public spaces instead. But that's where we chicken out, because no one wants to be seen as some kind of "oppressor" of "freedom." whether of individual righs (even if they're infringing on others' rights) or expression, and no one wants to be identified as intolerant of the "hard to house" or poor. - on 2009-05-08
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- ‘This is not a development that will allow the area's own character to evolve over time. Its character has been predetermined by architects, marketing specialists and planners. No room is left for responsiveness to people and locality.'
  - - from my own p.o.v., this is the most valid critique of privatized formerly public spaces. But it applies to overplanning in general, too. - on 2009-05-08
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- Some of the key issues raised included:
  
  The profession has overdone planning for all – we have lost the ability to say no, do little, allow people to make places work. Should urban designers say no to briefs they don’t think will work?
  Artists get selected too often for the way their work looks rather than the way they think – this can lead to clashes of ideology and aspirations. Too often the creative input of artists is not taken seriously by others – there is a ‘throw away mentality’ - how do we rectify this?
  The debate surrounding objects being placed in our cities and towns is obscuring the need for thoughtful places, which encourage real interaction. How can the two professions unite to encourage more creative clients?

02 Sep 08

"Benches easy on city's bottom line - and ours," by Christopher Hume (T.O. Star)

Brief article on the benefits of public benches on city sidewalks, and that T.O. has too few of them. Interestingly, this is something that has been bugging me for a while about Victoria, too. Too often, there is literally NO WHERE to sit, even on d/t streets with broad sidewalks. As soon as the street is out of the tourist district or off Government, no more benches. No benches on Fort or on Yates, two streets that are wide and generous in other respects (and the sidewalks are wide enough on Yates, although mingy on Fort). The comments on this article are useful, too.

www.thestar.com/487488 - Preview

thestar christopher_hume toronto cities amenities public_space street_appeal street_usage sidewalks

David Miller first got elected mayor all those years ago was his insistence on the public realm, everything from sidewalks and parks to subways and community centres.
Miller's argument was that we must create not just a livable city, but one we can fully inhabit. Livability, with overtones of convenience, isn't quite the same as inhabitability, a more all-encompassing term.
6 more annotations...
- The inhabitable city is one that can accommodate large numbers of people but which also engages residents at the most personal level. It is the city designed for the individual, not the masses, a dangerous and abstract concept at the best of times.
  - I like that distinction between inhabitability for the individual, not the masses... - on 2008-09-02
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- As it turns out, of course, doing one means doing the other. Take care of the individual; take care of the community.
- In hard-working Toronto, benches – public benches – are for the homeless, the indigent, the addicted, or worse still, the skateboarders. Thus they are a problem to be avoided, provided sparingly and with much disapproval.
- Most of Toronto's outdoor seating is in cafes and restaurants, but they are private and, therefore, controlled.
  For residents to feel the city belongs to them in a meaningful way, however, they must feel comfortable within it. They must believe themselves safe and secure, not just in the city but of it.
  We must remember that streets aren't simply ways to get from A to B, but are themselves destinations.
  True, our sidewalks tend to be narrow and mean, but we love them anyway and need more ways to enjoy them. The answer, obviously, is benches, benches and more benches. Planners should demand that all buildings of a certain size and use must have benches. All public facilities should have benches, as should corners.
  - Yes, corners should have benches. - on 2008-09-02
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- Then the city should focus on trees, which once defined Toronto, and drinking fountains, which used to be ubiquitous. After that, let's look at clocks.
  In these ways, we could enhance our relationship with the city at relatively low cost. Even if Toronto doesn't change, the experience would.
- We have no benches because our municipal leaders fear the homeless will take them over.
  
  Homelessness must be solved in realistic, humane ways. But denying everyone an attractive city where its people have a place in it, shows the failure of our leadership.

14 Jul 08

Closing on Broadway - Two Traffic Lanes - NYTimes.com

Article about the "Broadway Boulevard" project, which will take some of current automobile lanes and turn them into public seating/ parks and bike paths. The project stresses the importance of wresting public space back from cars, for public/ pedestrian/ non-vehicular use.

QUOTE:
“Broadway is not famous because there are a gazillion cars going through it,” she said. “We’re trying to have the public space match the name.”
UNQUOTE

www.nytimes.com/...11broadway.html - Preview

nyt nyc broadway traffi_calming public_space urban_parks urban_design

26 May 08

"L.A. vision: a towering sign," by David Zahniser (LA Times) - Astani Enterprises Inc

File this under "life imitates art"? There's a fascinating battle happening in LA over whether or not Sonny Astani, businessman and developer, should be permitted to install a new kind of LED-generated image, 12 stories above the street and 14 stories tall, on the side of his 33-story condo building currently under construction in downtown LA.

The inspiration? Opening scenes in Blade Runner of downtown LA, showing "a skyscraper-sized advertisement portraying a Japanese woman smiling before popping a snack into her mouth. Astani says an image, such as that of a flying sea gull, could now even travel from one building to the next."

I have to admit this sounds really cool, but I can see why many factions in LA would oppose this, too. We're all familiar with the really bright illuminated advertisements -- even Victoria has a small version of one, installed outside the arena on Blanshard at Caledonia. It's bright, too bright. But Astani proposes a much more modulated, artistic, and dimmed level of lighting. If the images could look as subtle -- yet powerful -- as Blade Runner's, it could work, but there's no garantee, that if permitted, subsequent developers would follow in that "artistic" style.

Another aspect is this: the proposal, if it's art, also calls into question just how intrusive public art should be in public space. Does it have a right to be so intrusive as to be impossible to ignore? Can I, as a citizen, be obliged to register public art -- and admittedly, it would be impossible not to register this project?

Is part of what captures my attention/ imagination regarding this project its uncanny fusion of subtlety and assault, packaged as visual stimulus?

Another question: is this an art form that expresses a corporate and anti-pedestrian city ("...neighborhood anchored by Staples Center and L.A. Live, the hotel and entertainment complex that includes the recently opened Nokia Theatre"), fitting for LA where people don't walk anyway (but just wait: it'll show up soon enough on the very v

www.astanienterprises.com/...article016.html - Preview

astani advertising billboards outdoor_installations public_art public_space los_angeles

Attach
an animated sign 14-stories tall on the 33-story condominium
project he is building in downtown L.A.
The proposed sign would loom 12 stories above the sidewalk at
9th and Figueroa streets, facing the 110 Freeway. And city planners
say it would represent a first in the city's residential architecture
-- a sheet of light-emitting screens spaced close enough to form
a vast electronic image, yet far enough apart to allow occupants
to look outside.
9 more annotations...
- Astani's proposal is only the latest controversial effort to
  bring massive advertising and colorful light shows to the neighborhood
  anchored by Staples Center and L.A. Live, the hotel and entertainment
  complex that includes the recently opened Nokia Theatre.
  
  Civic boosters promised two years ago that L.A. Live would transform
  Figueroa's entertainment district into Times Square West -- a
  California counterpart to the bright lights and in-your-face
  advertising seen at Broadway and 42nd Street in Manhattan.
- Although much of L.A. Live is under construction, the district
  around Staples already has some of those colorful lights, including
  the red squares that percolate like soda bubbles on the exterior
  of the Met Lofts and the spotlights at Nokia that strafe the
  sky,
- at least two high-rises could be partly covered with rows of
  tiny panels embedded with LEDs, or light-emitting diodes -- a
  concept viewed by some at City Hall as the next frontier in outdoor
  advertising.
- In November, the City
  Council approved Fig Central, a hotel and condominium complex
  across from Staples Center that will have at least one 330-foot-long
  band of animated advertising. And at least seven more electronic
  signs are planned for the rest of L.A. Live, according to city
  officials.
  
  The courtyard outside Nokia Theatre has 12 LED signs -- enormous
  screens that intersperse concert footage with advertisements
  for mobile phones and Coca-Cola. The theater is adorned with
  more screens and billboards, a fact that disappoints some neighbors.
- "It might actually be beautiful," she said. "It
  might actually be art, as opposed to just ads."
- The billboard question seemed finally to have been answered
  in 2002, when then-Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski, after 14 years
  of trying, won passage of a ban on outdoor advertising. But that
  law also contained a provision allowing the creation of "supplemental
  use districts," places like Hollywood, where billboards
  would be permitted in large numbers.
- he argues that his LED displays should
  not be considered billboards.
  
  To make the images less blinding, the signs would have a brightness
  of only 1,200 candelas at night -- roughly one-sixth the intensity
  of the signs found at L.A. Live, Astani said. And because the
  movements of his LED sign would be slower than the images on
  a television screen, Astani contends, his 14-story sign would
  be graceful, not gaudy.
  
  "We don't want to create a monster," Astani said. "If
  this is bright or intrusive, we cannot sell the condominiums.
  It will have to be so unique and unobtrusive that people will
  be proud to live behind it."
- If approved, the signs would contain artistic content during
  10% of their operation, with another 10% devoted to community
  announcements, according to Astani's proposal. The sign rules
  also would dictate the speed with which the animated images change.
  - Only 10% artistic content sounds pretty mingy... - on 2008-05-26
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- Most of the companies installing the new lights have ties to
  City Hall. L.A. Live builder Anschutz Entertainment Group has
  given $485,000 to causes backed by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
  The developer of Fig Central has given $100,000; Astani has given
  $150,000.

26 Mar 08

Street photographers fear for their art amid climate of suspicion - Times Online

Here's a sobering article on the general hysteria over "terrorism," which has resulted in getting street photographers arrested or detained or questioned. Anyone seen taking photographs, especially covertly or seemingly so, is likely to get in trouble these days. But how can you be a good street photographer if you don't conceal just a little bit the fact that you're taking photos in the first place? You want that candid moment, right?

entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/...article3574763.ece - Preview

freedom paranoia photography public_space street_photography terrorism

Matt Stuart photographs the unscripted drama of the London streets. Entirely
spontaneous, his pictures are made possible by a combination of instinct,
cunning and happy coincidence, revealing the beauty and significance of the
everyday - what the rest of us see but don't notice, moments that vanish
faster than the blink of an eye.

For his efforts, Stuart has picked up a little collection of pink
stop-and-search slips, souvenirs of practising a century-old art form in a
city increasingly paranoid and authoritarian.
After 11 years, Stuart is
something of an old hand. Using the street photographer's traditional tool
of choice - the discreet and near silent Leica camera - he knows how to make
himself invisible, make an image and move on. He rarely runs into trouble;
when he does, he knows his rights.
9 more annotations...
- a new poster campaign by the Metropolitan Police is inviting Londoners to
  call a hotline if they don't like the look of a photographer. “Thousands of
  people take photos every day,” runs the text. “What if one of them seems
  odd?” The poster states that terrorists use cameras for surveillance.
- “People need to understand the context,” Stuart says. “We've been mistaken for
  paparazzi and attacked since Princess Diana died. As far as the public's
  concerned, if you're a man with a camera you're probably a paedophile. And
  now, if we look ‘odd', we're also more than likely terrorists.”
- To some, the very idea of covertly photographing strangers might seem “odd”,
  even distasteful. And yet a proportion of those same people will own a print
  of Robert Doisneau's Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville, or have sent greetings
  cards showing 1930s Paris, as recorded by Brassai. Street photography has
  given us a lot. More, perhaps, than we know.
- Street photography doesn't just document what our environment used to look
  like; it shows us how it really looks now, freezing the moment to reveal the
  weirdness and magic of the split second ... Stuart's photograph of a young
  dancer, in mid-air, upside-down, in Trafalgar Square ... Mermelstein's of a
  woman out walking her pet iguana. These images reveal the surreal in the
  real, force us to appreciate that our city spaces are collages of constantly
  shifting, surprising juxtaposition.
- I ask Mermelstein whether he's ever hesitated before recording a complete
  stranger. He says he has ... “but I believe firmly that if something's in
  the public domain then one has the right to render them photographically.
  That if you're out on the street, you're in public.
  - - interesting, how that compares to France... - on 2008-03-26
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- But aren't there times when he'd rather not be photographed? “Living
  in London I'm filmed 300 times a day by CCTV, so I've got over that
  quickly.”
  - - touchE! - on 2008-03-26
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- “In France, traditionally one of
  the great centres of street photography, the law now says you own the rights
  to your own image, so street photography's become a dead art. In London
  there's a growing community of photographers, using digi- tal technology,
  not just cameras, but blogs, too, to document the city and give each other
  instant feedback.”
- “I'm not going to belittle the issue of terrorism, but this is paranoia. And
  unfortunately, since Lady Di and now this link with terrorists,
  photography's seen by many people as something that's a little ... cheap.”
- Street photography on the net
  www.in-public.com
  
  A showcase of contemporary street photographers, including work by Matt
  Stuart, plus a “masters” section, featuring the brilliant and influential
  Joel Meyerowitz.
  www.seconds2real.com
  
  An international street photography collective, with a newsletter, and links
  to interviews by and films of masters of the art.
  www.public-life.org
  
  A German-based collective, including galleries, news and book reviews.
  www.billcharles.com/merm/jeffmermelstein_1.htm
  
  Work by Jeff Mermelstein, chronicler of New York.
  www.magnumphotos.com
  
  The world's most famous photographic agency includes work by some of the
  pioneers and masters of street photography, including Henri Cartier-Bresson
  and Elliott Erwitt.

23 Jan 08

The Mobile City - TV glasses - watching video in private

Mobile City asks all the right questions (in this case, about video glasses, a visual sort of iPod or Walkman device). Eg.: "...it’s another addition to the array of media to shield off private media consumption in public places. Just like the Walkman/iPod earbuds privatized personal music listening, these glasses may do something similar for watching video/TV. The same ol’ question arises again: what does this mean for publicness of places?"

What does it mean for the publicness of places? Or, alternately, what does it mean for polite anonymity, for protective anonymity? At what point does privacy become just a big too ...aggressive and impolite for civic intercourse?

www.themobilecity.nl/...sses-watching-video-in-private - Preview

anonymity cities privacy public_space technology

Why do I find this interesting? First of all it’s another addition to the array of media to shield off private media consumption in public places. Just like the Walkman/iPod earbuds privatized personal music listening, these glasses may do something similar for watching video/TV. The same ol’ question arises again: what does this mean for publicness of places? I can also imagine the possibilities for musea and the tourism industry to use this device for visually augmented tours? Any examples yet?
Second, this device points to some media characteristics that are important to distinguish. This pair of glasses in its current state overlays physical reality with an added layer of information. Just like ‘passive’ navigation devices such as TomTom, it is augmenting space with an extra level of added information. It is not creating a truly hybrid space in the sense of - following Adriana De Souza e Silva’s writings - enabling social interaction in both physical and digital spaces at the same time, which are mutually influencing each other.

Yet what if new uses are created with such a device? What if video-calls (e.g. via Skype) are possible through these pair of glasses, calls that take place both in digital space and influence the physical space and vice versa? Or if you watch Youtube video’s on this thing and immediately comment on them via your cell phone? Then this device would enable the creation of hybrid spaces. So augmented space or hybrid space it is not inherent in the technologies but always defined by the social processes in which technologies are used.

Sure footing on Jarvis slip by Christopher Hume (Toronto Star)

This is the article that accompanies the video (also linked to today). It's about the three finalists in the competition to redesign T.O. waterfront along the Jarvis Slip. Best quote: "Though the three finalists are all quite different, in their own way each takes conventional notions of public space and carefully turns it upside down. This is exactly what Toronto's waterfront needs."

www.thestar.com/295532 - Preview

christopher_hume jarvis_slip public_space toronto waterfront

The likely winner, however, is Toronto landscape architecture firm, Janet Rosenberg Associates. It envisions a square by the water, hard-surfaced and dotted with armchairs. The highlight would be an environmental artwork by California-based Ned Kahn.
The three-part piece would have a shallow pond, a "roof" and a giant 20- by 13-metre "screen" made of clear "pixels" that blow in the wind.
The idea is to embrace the weather, to make it a part of the square, to illustrate it somehow and actually make it visible.
The double row of trees that extends along the lake's edge would break up here to allow for maximum access to the water.
Though the three finalists are all quite different, in their own way each takes conventional notions of public space and carefully turns it upside down. This is exactly what Toronto's waterfront needs.
It's reassuring, too, that the square will sit on land that could easily have been ignored and left untouched. Yet it is precisely this sort of detail that will bring the waterfront to life and attract an audience beyond the immediate.
Perhaps the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corp. – now Waterfront Toronto – should create an idea bank, an inventory of schemes that can be brought out when opportunities arise. In this case, all three finalists have done projects on the waterfront; it might be that this familiarity allowed them to produce such excellent schemes.
"I'm very excited," says Chris Glaisek, Toronto Waterfront vice-president of planning. "This space didn't exist, but now I think it's going to be one of the best public places on the water's edge. It'll be a space people love to come to."

Enhancing the Jarvis Slip by Christopher Hume (TheStar.com - Video Viewer)

The Toronto Star put up a video of Christopher Hume explaining the 3 finalist contenders for re-making Jarvis Slip, a T.O. d/t lakefront public area.

This makes me think of how important speech (vs. the word as read) is when thinking about any issues, and of how important the speaker is (his/her manner/ abilities at conversation). Hume has done an excellent job on other videos posted to the Toronto Star, explaining the city's architecture for downloadable walking tours.

www.thestar.com/...295439 - Preview

architecture christopher_hume jarvis_slip public_space toronto video waterfront

31 Dec 07

Toronto's year of living large - and tall (Toronto Star)

"Love it or hate it, the ROM Crystal signalled the return of ambition to our architectural stage" -- Christopher Hume on the change(s) in the role of buildings, public architecture, and public perceptions around the values of public space.

www.thestar.com/...289358 - Preview

architecture christopher_hume cities museums public_buildings public_space toronto urbanism

If nothing else, 2007 was the year Toronto's Cultural Renaissance hit its stride. The main event was the opening of the Royal Ontario Museum's Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. Designed by New York-based architect Daniel Libeskind, the $400-million addition offended many, pleased a few, but in either case, it raised the stakes hugely. This isn't a city given to risk-taking, but what's often overlooked is that Libeskind's radical remake of the ROM addresses the urban condition as much as institutional revitalization. The result is a building that has reconnected with the city, and that's fully a part of the urban scene.
Just across the road from the ROM, the compact Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art found new life as the jewel in Toronto's cultural crown. Redesigned by KPMB, this is the urban project par excellence, filled with exhilarating spaces and exquisitely integrated, it could serve as a model for everything that follows.
4 more annotations...
- On the other hand, the much-delayed Metropolis at the northeast corner of Yonge and Dundas turned out to be a dud.
  Though it forms one edge of the square, and occupies land on a major downtown intersection, it seems oblivious to anything beyond its own banality.
  - - would love more info on the dud: why it doesn't work, what's wrong with it, how it could have been better... - on 2007-12-31
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- Further north, the city's love affair with the condo tower reached new heights; a tower at Yonge and Bloor will stand 80 storeys tall and a second, at Yonge and Gerrard, 75 storeys.
  Though neither tower could be described as architecturally exciting, both are presentable. At the same time, however, most development happened in the vacuum that passes for planning in Toronto.
- Think of West Queen West, which was "salvaged" at the last minute after the city had lost at the Ontario Municipal Board, the de facto city planner.
  - - another interesting difference: that T.O. has this Ontario Municipal Board, which can override council's land use decisions... - on 2007-12-31
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- The final irony was Pier 27, the condo launched at the foot of Yonge St. on the water's edge. Designed by Peter Clewes of architectsAlliance, it will be one of the most interesting residential projects ever built in Toronto.
  The problem is that it should have been anywhere but here, prime waterfront land that calls out to be part of the public realm.

30 Dec 07

A Streetcar of Solace Is Back in New Orleans - New York Times

Adam Nossiter reports on the St.Charles line (downtown/ French Quarter / uptown connector), back in action in New Orleans. Many useful references for public space, urban fabric connections, lived history experiences. (via CEOs for Cities blog)

www.nytimes.com/...30streetcar.html - Preview

adam_nossiter new_orleans public_space streetcars transit

The streetcar has represented something else besides the connections through time and space: the city’s living room, a privileged spot for tentative social encounters across lines of race, class and nationality, in a place not otherwise given to them. Thanks to an accelerated repair schedule, that meeting place, absent since the hurricane, is back.
Before the storm, the St. Charles streetcar was at least an image of the social ideal. Uptown lawyers in seersucker sat by weary-looking housekeepers going to the downtown hotels. Noisy schoolchildren jostled for space with tourists from France, Rome and Australia wondering about the solemn fellow on the column at Lee Circle. (That would be Robert E. Lee.) Prim suburbanites visiting from Nashville and Atlanta, and encountering public transportation for the first time, smiled nervously past muttering bums. No other city in the South entertained such a mix.
In the worn wooden interior, bathed in the smell of sulfur and the soothing racket of clanging machinery, the fractures in the stratified city melted, slightly. And what would be deficiencies in other places — improbable premodern slowness, the occasional surly conductor, unexplained lengthy halts between stops — were virtues. The conductor sang out, ingeniously mispronounced, the names of the Greek muses that double as street names here: MEL-Po-MEEN! (Melpomene) TER-Chicoree!(Terpsichore) You were getting somewhere, slowly. Complicated reading could be accomplished.
Excellent, as a rider named Cherry Gardon put it the other day, “if you’re not in a rush to get to work” — a widely held ethic.
2 more annotations...
- “The streetcar is not just something convenient,” said Manuel García-Castellón, riding it recently to his job as a professor of romance languages at the University of New Orleans.
  He struggled to explain why something so irrational could also be so indispensable. “Sometimes, I think I’m in the salotto of my house,” he said, using the Italian word for parlor.
  In July and August, the streetcar effects a miracle: benign contact with the superheated New Orleans air. All the windows come down, the sweet, thick air rushes in, and you are in a truce with the beast of the South Louisiana summer.
- “It brings it back to where you were.”
  - - evocative, telling way of putting it - on 2007-12-30
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05 Nov 07

Extra! Extra! Placemaking in the News! | Project for Public Spaces (PPS)

www.pps.org/...placemaking_in_the_media - Preview

fred_kent public_space urban_parks urbanplanning

Yule Heibel's Library tagged public_space → View Popular

Fairy tale or horror story - join the debate | RUDI - Resource for Urban Design Information

"Benches easy on city's bottom line - and ours," by Christopher Hume (T.O. Star)

Closing on Broadway - Two Traffic Lanes - NYTimes.com

"L.A. vision: a towering sign," by David Zahniser (LA Times) - Astani Enterprises Inc

Street photographers fear for their art amid climate of suspicion - Times Online

The Mobile City - TV glasses - watching video in private

Sure footing on Jarvis slip by Christopher Hume (Toronto Star)

Enhancing the Jarvis Slip by Christopher Hume (TheStar.com - Video Viewer)

Toronto's year of living large - and tall (Toronto Star)

A Streetcar of Solace Is Back in New Orleans - New York Times

Extra! Extra! Placemaking in the News! | Project for Public Spaces (PPS)

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