The Wa’s Basket Bin
The French urban interventionist (if that’s a profession) The Wa has transformed a traffic sign in Marseille into a basketball waste bin. Passers-by can dump their rubbish here, but have to produce a lay-up, dunk or try it for three points.
Like It In Real Life
A lot of things that seem to be easy online are incredibly hard offline. Like making friends, or storing of old unused stuff. Since Facebook started with the Like button, this also counts for expressing appreciation. It’s easy to express enthusiasm about an online phenomenon, but about a real-life object there’s no clear method to […]
Shed Light On The Lack Of Urban Green Spaces
I can’t help imagining a butterfly effect between the current spontaneous protests sweeping across Spain and the interventions by the Luzinterruptus collective. At least, I like the idea. Since 2008, the Madrid-based street art group has been acting “with the simple idea of focusing people’s attention by using light on problems that we found in the […]
9 June: Pop-Up Talks Amsterdam
In collaboration with housing association Ymere we are organizing a cosy and inspirational event at the RAI congress center in Amsterdam, which will be taking place on Thursday 9 June. Under the name Pop-Up Talks, we have invited four new kids on the block in the worlds of architecture and urbanism to take the audience […]
Advertising Was The New Poetry
Blaise Cendrars claimed advertising to be the new poetry. Robert Montgomery makes us think the other way around. In his ‘Words in the City at Night’ series, the London-based artist hijacks large advertising billboards and bus stops to display his melancholic poems, echoing the Situationist concept of détournement. He explains: “What interests me in working anonymously is […]
Cities As Big Playgrounds
Here on Pop-Up City, we are big fans of urban games. We love urban games because they change our perception of routine spaces, they invite us as citizens to take over public spaces, they encourage interactions with strangers, and because most of them are just fun! Berlin's Invisible Playground collective makes Street Games, Audio Adventures and Playful Theater that turn the city into a giant playground.
Strelka: Drinks And Urbanism
Strelka is a new spot for architecture and media in Moscow. It’s a post-graduate institute dedicated to developing new perspectives on critical issues in contemporary Russia. It’s interesting in the first place because of the combination between architecture and media, but also because of the setup of the whole institute. Strelka is built in a […]
Bird Nest Hotel
More than two years ago we featured this wicked ‘invisible’ tree hotel room by Videgard Hansson Arkitekter in the Swedish town of Harads. Their creation is part of the Tree Hotel, a hotel that consists of five extraordinary rooms in the woods of northern Sweden. Dezeen just featured one of the other rooms of the hotel: a huge […]
AOL’s Rainbow City
We predicted the top trend of 2011 to be ‘marketing is urbanism’, which stands for the increasing involvement of brands and companies in shaping the urban atmosphere. Brand exposure seems to go beyond ordinary advertising — it has become an integral part of urbanism, architecture and urban planning practice. AOL’s Rainbow City is just another campaign […]
Will The Future City Be A Power Plant?
The last years were all about energy saving. Nowadays it seems to be more helpful to generate energy yourself. Everywhere in the world neighborhoods are built with all kinds of energy-creating concepts embedded. Communities collectively generate energy from the sun, wind, and even their own daily activity or their excreta, and deliver it back on […]
Repudo: Digital Easter Eggs In Physical Space
There is a new kid on the block in the world of location-based media. It is called Repudo and it is all about dropping and picking up digital presents in physical space. The service, which is available as a smartphone app (currently only for iPhone and Android), enables its users to leave all kinds of multimedia […]
Architecture That Grows And Repairs Itself
We like to consider the city as an organism but are cities really living? Thanks to new technologies, living architecture and literally sustainable cities may become a reality. Rachel Armstrong collaborates with architects and scientists to explore the use of metabolic materials for the practice of architecture — construction materials that possess some of the properties of living systems, and can be manipulated to 'grow' architecture.
Slow Food On A Fast Subway
As we recently saw, pop-up restaurants are growing like mushrooms in the most strange places we can imagine. But what if I tell you that also the subway could be the perfect location to have a wonderful lunch? Yes, and not a random one, but New York City’s subway, that chaotic labyrinth full of running […]
Build A $300 House
“About 2 billion people live in absolute poverty. In 2010 the United Nations calculated that there were about 827m people living in slums and predicted that the number might double by 2030.” — The Economist Last year, Vijay Govindarajan and Christian Sarkar urged CEOs, Governments, NGOs, Foundations to join forces and tackle the global housing-for-the-poor […]
MONU #14: Editing Urbanism
The latest issue of MONU Magazine — an independent biannual publication devoted to writings on urbanism — has hit newsstands. Always theme-based, this particular issue centres on the idea of ‘Editing Urbanism’. When the term was first raised in MONU’s call for proposals, I immediately thought of the kind of editing that involved addition — small-scale, […]
