best urban spaces

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.

Comments

[neilperkin]

Lovely idea Russell. Personally think I prefer your positive outlook but both will be interesting :)

[Jo de mornay]

Sounds really interesting - have you thought about approaching Creative review? They publish their small pamphlet publication each month "Monograph' for subscribers, which features a project or personal body of work. Might be quite well suited?

[Douglass Turner]

Russell,
I've been trying unsuccessfully for about ten minutes to figure out how to upload a photo directly to the photo pool. No joy. Could you please enlighten me on how to do this?

Cheers,
Doug Turner
email: douglass dot turner at gmail dot com

[simon roberts]

I struggled with Flickr, unusually, to do this....

The answer? Upload the photo to your flickr account. go to the page view for that photo and then select "send to group" from the list of options above that photo

[ADF]

The use of Flickr in creating a project like this is great, just growing accustomed to it as it looks a bit smarter nowadays.

Presently in Bangkok. Great photops!

[Luca Vergano]

russell this sounds like a great idea, you know my longtime obsession with what we called during an exchange "context planning". Great.

[Ben]

Yeah, this is great.

[Stefan G. Bucher]

Maybe you could do pamphlets that will fit into a custom ring binder? (You know me: Always chasing the nifty.)

[Dennis Rito]

Hello!

I am interested in this topic and i wish to ask if you'll accept entries from southeast asia - the Philippines in particular? Likewise, i wish to know if the copyright of the submitted photograph will still remain with the photographer (which i think is the right thing).

Regards,

Dennis Rito
http://dennisrito.blogspot.com