urbanism

This Is What Happens When You Turn a Street Into a Slip ‘n Slide

Closing streets to cars is one thing—how about flooding them with water and letting people slide down head first? Hundreds of Brits got to do just that when a busy street in Bristol was transformed into a fully operational water slide today. As expected, the photos are absolutely incredible. The slide was the idea of…

NYC Cyclist Arrested for Trying to Film a Cop with His Phone

When 24-year-old Brooklyn resident Will Paybarah was stopped by police for running a red light on his bike on March 20, he was expecting a ticket or possibly just a warning—until he took out his phone. “When I tried to record my interaction with the officer I was arrested… in 10 seconds flat,” he tells…

How Location Scouts Find The Places That Look Like Somewhere Else

For filmmakers, Los Angeles is basically infinite. It is a mega-city that contains every other city within it—indeed, seemingly every other Earthly landscape is hidden somewhere in plain sight—whether it’s a street that looks like Manhattan or a county park that literally looks like another world. In Los Angeles, something as simple as an empty…

Natural Disasters, Locks, Tires: What’s Ruining Our Cities This Week

On this week’s What’s Ruining Our Cities: Locks are the key to Paris’s downfall and tires are popping up in the most unexpected places in Detroit. Plus, a new exhibition is focused exclusively on ruined cities—and the designers that work to save them. Designers are making sure disasters don’t ruin cities We talk a lot…

This Interactive Ashtray Rewards Smokers For Throwing Away Their Butts

Cigarette butts are the bane of a city’s existence: you can find them almost everywhere, smashed flat on the sidewalks, stubbed into planter boxes, drifting into the gutters like tube-shaped snow. While some public spaces offer ways to dispose of those lipstick-rimmed filters, most smokers simply use the street as an open ashtray. The Dutch…

Photos of Fences in Brooklyn Make Urban Eyesores Beautiful

There are certain tropes you see when walking the streets of any big city, most of which are so banal they never cross your mind. Charles Johnstone makes it his photographic endeavor to catalog some of these phenomena, as in his Brooklyn Fences series. The mundane nature of the the fences has a way of…

A Subterranean Stroll Through NYC’s Newest Train Tunnel

New York City’s new 2nd Avenue subway line is a construction project of truly monumental scale. Decades of planning and billions of dollars have led to the near-completion of Phase 1 of the tunnel running underneath Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Gizmodo was lucky enough to take a tour through a section of the caverns and…

Explore Cool Urban Bike Routes From The Comfort Of Your Couch

Today is the first of May, and May, my friends, is National Bike Month. That’s right! Time to celebrate the wind-in-your-hair freedom that is flying down the streets on a two-wheeled, pedal-powered vehicle. So here are some cool first-person vids of cycle routes in cities around the world. They come courtesy of Cyclodeo, a Netherlands-based…

NYC’s Most Lucrative Fire Hydrant Earns The City $33,000 a Year

The fire hydrant. For decades, it has been feared by any New York City driver who dares to venture out without a tape measure. If your car comes within 15 feet of a hydrant, the next thing you know you may be at the tow pound, picking it up with a several hundred dollar bill.…

So Portland’s Not Flushing That Urine-Tainted Reservoir After All

Remember when Portland was gonna dump 38 million gallons of drinking water because that one dude peed in it? Well, it turns out the city has had a change of heart, and the water won’t be flushed—at least not just yet. According to NBC News, the tainted water was diverted to another reservoir where it’s…

Madrid’s New Parking Meters Charge More For Gas Guzzlers

Drive a diesel car in Madrid and soon it’ll cost you in more than fuel. The Spanish city is introducing new smart parking meters which will add a surcharge to your tariff if you’re driving a heavily polluting car. The new initiative, which starts on July 1st, will use a complex pricing table—dictated by engine…

It’s Amazingly Easy to Hack Our Traffic Data And Cause Gridlock Chaos

Turns out you don’t need a shady, possibly-issued-from-the-governor lane closure on a major bridge to jam traffic. The sensor and signaling infrastructure on our streets is so vulnerable that all you need to wreak widespread havoc is a laptop. A scary piece by Wired that reads like the script of Die Hard 4 exposes frightening…

Who Is Breathing the Worst Air in America?

Air pollution in the U.S. is better than it was a decade ago, but a staggering 147.6 million Americans—47 percent of the country—live in places where air quality is often too dangerous to breathe, according to the American Lung Association’s State of the Air report. The new study looked at a three-year span of 2010,…

Up in the Air: Using Tethered Balloons to Photograph the Future City

Sometimes even the most visionary architects need a little perspective—a way to see what’s just over the horizon. To show them what’s coming, photographer Curt Westergard delivers a peek at the near-future using one of the oldest, most low-tech solutions on the planet: Balloons. Westergard is founder of Virginia-based Digital Design & Imaging Service, which…

This Japanese House Is Entirely Clad in Aluminum

Talk about tin foil hats: this house is for the truly paranoid. Sitting in a small provincial town near Tokyo, this house is clad entirely in a soft metallic coat of aluminum. The brainchild of Japanese architect Terunobu Fujimori, Soft-Hard Aluminium House is covered in a kind of quilted aluminum. Flanked by normal residential dwellings,…

NYC’s 3,500-Year-Old Monument Is Being Cleaned With Freaking Lasers

Cleopatra’s Needle is New York City’s oldest outdoor monument; it’s been around for a whopping 3,500 (!) years, and has spent the past 133 of those in Central Park. This spring, it’s getting gently blasted with laser beams—all in the name of conservation. The Central Park Conservancy has teamed up with the Metropolitan Museum of…

Aging Baby Boomers Could Be The Boost America’s Public Transit Needs

Baby Boomers are getting older. Their eyesight isn’t what it used to be, and their reaction time is slowing. Even if they’ve been faithful drivers all their lives, their primary means of getting around might start to shift away from the car. Which is great news for public transit in the U.S. The AARP has…

Keeping bees in Buffalo, pouring concrete in Los Angeles, and using the subway as a data-collection tool in Moscow. Plus, both Time and the Wall Street Journal examine our high-rising ways. Take a peek at this week’s Urban Reads. “As a city, Buffalo has some characteristics that are beneficial for undercover beekeeping. It has a…

In this week’s Landscape Reads, we visit the giant, steel sarcophagus that will soon encase Chernobyl, go inside the battle for “solar rights,” pay tribute to the blazing fires that created the American prairie, and follow the secret highway crossings of bears. Building Chernobyl’s Massive Radiation-Proof Sarcophagus The steel arch that will encase Chernobyl is…

How An Artist Blanketed Los Angeles In Wildflowers

Driving around L.A. during the last month, you might have noticed a flash of fluorescent yellow and neon pink breaking up the monotony of lawns. It’s a project called Wildflowering L.A. which planted 50 lots around Los Angeles in native seeds. This week, the plantings hit peak bloom, transforming swatches of property across the city…