There's a fantastic blog called Digital Urban. It's the work of a guy called Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith and is "aimed at examining the latest techniques to visualise the city scape via digital media". There's always interesting stuff on there, especially all the work they're doing on virtual london. A little while back they raised the notion of making a book about the World's Worst Urban Places and Spaces. It's going to be a crowd-sourced, self-publishingy thing written via contributions to a special flickr group. I thought that was a really interesting idea, a great way to use a distributed publishing model.
But, while chatting about it with Mr Dan Hill and, both of us being mindless optimists, we wondered if we could do a companion piece about The World's Best Urban Places and Spaces. That seemed like a good idea too. Accentuate the positive and all that. So we checked with Dr Hudson-Smith, he's cool with it, so here we go.
This is the plan. Dan's set up a flickr group here, all you need to do is contribute a picture or pictures and as much text as you think is appropriate. We'll leave you to interpret 'best' 'urban' 'space' and 'place' as you like. Could be anywhere or anything; bus shelters, buildings, bombsites or benches. Rather than wait until we've got enough for a book (which, of course, may never happen) we're planning instead on doing a series of pamphlets. We're going to try and persuade some top designers to do them for us. There'll be a free one as a pdf online and lovely specially printed ones for everyone who contributes and/or who'd like to buy them. Obviously we've not really worked out all the details on that yet, but will let you know when we have.
Does that sound interesting? I think it might be. Pile in, if you'd like to.
