Well even though this blog has been almost forgotten, I thought this article was interesting and somewhat related to the class next week on compact cities:

As for the choices, I don’t know if anyone has the Olsen Banden. I do have Inception and Alphaville so I can bring them for Wednesday’s session. Again we start at 5pm, we should try to start asap so try to get your food and drinks beforehand.

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Found a short post on the placeshakers & newsmakers blog about communicating urban planning (or any other discipline not entirely beloved by the general public) ideas. Basically, keep it simple, keep it relevant.

Back in June, I wrote a piece about how, compared to sprawl, smart growth produces places better suited to raising children. The overall takeaway was simple: When kids are able to navigate the world around them, manage conflicts, make decisions, screw up and recover, they’re better off for it. And place is a big contributor to that. Attracting families to life in the city can be a difficult endeavor. But given the stakes, it’s a critical one.

Over the course of the post, I touched on a lot of different things. Vancouver, and the challenges they faced with their own smart growth efforts. Buying happiness,helicopter parenting and fragile, teacup children. The value of independence, and the need to align political and market forces to make things happen. And, oh yeah. Popsicles.

Which idea do you think actually went somewhere?

If you guessed popsicles, consider yourself a winner. That’s because, two months after I resurrected the old idea (and not my own) of the “popsicle test” — the ability of an 8 year old to safely get somewhere to buy a popsicle, then make it home before it melts — as the measure of a good neighborhood, Kaid Benfield used it, along with the notion of good trick-or-treating, for his own exploration on the NRDC Switchboard. As many of you know, Kaid is also a contributor to The Atlantic, and they chose to republish the post a day or two after that.

Once something hits The Atlantic, you make the leap from smart growth geekdom to a broader audience, and that’s when the “popsicle test” caught the attention of Lenore Skenazy, champion of the Free Range Kids advocacy movement, who featured it on her own blog. That transitioned it to an idea less about planning and more about parenting.

Parenting, of course, represents a lot more potentially interested people, which is probably why popsicles, a tiny supporting example from my original post on a much larger topic, was ultimately picked up by Boing Boing, the widely-read “directory of wonderful things” and go-to blog for folks of all stripes.

So why am I rehashing the details? Because they contain a valuable lesson for those of us working in the trenches of smart growth and sustainability. So long as we’re talking to each other — and, admittedly, that’s part of the process — all the secret handshakes of wonky language are accepted. Even preferred, sometimes. But that same language presents a formidable barrier to wider interest and wider interest is where movements really take shape. keep reading at placeshakers.wordpress.com

Bodies in urban space by Willi Dorner showed us in Brussels already, how to use the urban architecture and surrounding to disappear. Another form to hide and get fully caught by the urban space is presented by the performer „Liu Bolin“:

http://www.ekfineart.com/html/artistresults.asp?artist=82

http://unurth.com/113325/Liu-Bolin-Hiding-In-The-City

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/fast_track/9533632.stm

L.U.C. and Sokół, two Polish hip-hop artists began a mass urban renewal movement. The idea is simple: to eradicate kitsch, dullness and ugliness that have long infected Polish cities. The two gentlemen sing and act and indeed more and more places, especially the post-war communist housing estates (bloki) turn into at least to a degree more unique, interesting areas. The results are here.