Stadlab Amsterdam is een platform voor Amsterdammers om samen op nieuwe manieren aan de vitaliteit en leefbaarheid van hun stad te werken. Stadlab Amsterdam gaat over projecten en het concreet herontwerpen van de stad, maar ook over het inrichten van de stad als leeromgeving en het ontdekken van nieuwe ontwerpprincipes. We detecteren initiatieven in de stad die reeds aan het experimenteren zijn.
Onder de noemer Stadlab worden er verschillende evenementen georganiseerd met betrekking op herontwikkeling, tijdelijkheid, lokale democratie, ondernemen in de wijk en coöperatieve gebiedsontwikkeling.
Wil je op de hoogte blijven van de Stadlab programma’s? Meld je hier aan voor de nieuwsbrief!

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Een Programma voor Victory Boogie Woogie

“Het programma dat ik geschreven heb is voor Victory Boogie Woogie in de zin dat het een programma is voor het bestuderen van de Victory Boogie Woogie. Het is ook bedoeld als een eerbetoon voor de Victory Boogie Woogie en voor Mondriaan.
Aanleiding voor het schrijven van het programma is de Call For Code uitgeschreven door
Setup en Gemeentemuseum Den Haag voor 7 Maart 2013. Voor mijzelf zijn er twee extra redenen.
Ten eerste mijn belangstelling voor het gebied “Creative Programming”, die hoort bij mijn werk.
Ten tweede mijn project van eind jaren ‘90 dat heeft geleid tot één programma waarvan de output is geïnspireerd op een aantal verschillende compositietypen. Over dat programma heb ik nadien gepubliceerd in Leonardo en in Matematica e Cultura. Mijn programma van toen stopt vóór de Boogie Woogies, die ik destijds als té complex, voor mij althans, beschouwde.
Nu in 2013 heb ik een nieuw programma geschreven, dat mijn oude principes uitbreidt. De nieuwe code is in Processing (Java) in plaats van het achterhaalde Turbopascal en is specifiek voor Victory Boogie Woogie – hoewel de ingrediënten ervan ook voor eerdere compositietypen gebruikt zouden kunnen worden. Mijn claim is dat het programmeren een manier is om naar Mondriaan’s werk te kijken, er vocabulaire voor te ontwikkelen, méér te zien en het beter te begrijpen. De code belichaamt zo nieuwe kennis. Of zoals Michael A. Noll mij recent schreef: “Art, design, mathematics, computers – all are interrelated today.”

Klik hier om verder te lezen
© Loe Feijs en TU/e

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The CitySDK Mobility API

The CitySDK Mobility API, developed by Waag Society is a layer-based data distribution and service kit. Part of CitySDK, a European project in which eight cities (Manchester, Rome, Lamia, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Barcelona, Lisbon and Istanbul) and more than 20 organisations collaborate, the CitySDK Mobility API enables easy development and distribution of digital services across different cities. The API is a powerful tool that helps governments and officials alike.

CitySDK Mobility links datasets through addressable, real-world objects. The organization of the information is extremely simple; there are nodes and information on these nodes. A node can be anything; a landmark, a bus-stop, a stretch of road, a town or a public transport line. All nodes are a node, but there are multiple types of nodes which are treated specially: these are route, region, ptstop and ptline. A route is a series of nodes in a particular order. A region is a node that represents a formal administrative region. Since the API also deals with open government data, it is convenient to have these nodes available as a shortcut. This allows for easy attachment of data on towns, suburbs and neighborhoods. We define the country as level 0, the provinces as 1, the municipalities as level 3 (level 2 is for larger regions that are not provinces, like Stadsregio Amsterdam), quarters (‘wijken’) are level 4, neigborhoods are level 5. Amsterdam also defines an even smaller area, level 6. We are assessing whether to bring these levels in line with the levels as used in OSM, so this may change. ptstop and ptline nodes represent public transport stops and lines.

CitySDK project site
CitySDK Mobility API endpoint
Visualisation of CitySDK Mobility data

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Playable City

From street art to street games, in the last five years Bristol has put itself on the map by inviting residents and visitors from across the world to join in its playful approach to public spaces, and engage with the city’s creative and cultural future. In 2012, Bristol’s Watershed launched The Playable City Award, a £30,000 prize and package of support to make something playable in Bristol.

The Playable City is a new term, imagined as a counterpoint to ‘A Smart City’. A Playable City is a city where people, hospitality and openness are key, enabling its residents and visitors to reconfigure and rewrite its services, places and stories. It is a place where there is permission to be playful in public. The Playable City Award is part of Watershed’s ongoing investigation into this theme.

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BMW Guggenheim Lab has released a new resource, ’100 Urban Trends’, a glossary of the most talked about urban ideas collected from two years of programs, workshops and projects in NYC, Berlin and Mumbai. It aims to identify the top trends in urban thinking as they were discussed in the three locations.

Each glossary offers 100 contextualized definitions that apply to the way we understand, design, and live in cities. They are new and old, classic and ephemerally fashionable. Each definition concludes with an example of a Lab program that illustrated the relevance and context of that term. The top trends include:

• 3-D Printer – the rise of 3-D printers in rapid prototyping has popularized and democratized the creation of objects at an individual level. 3-D printers are changing the way we understand and construct our built environment.
• Bike Politics – this refers to the debate on greater bike infrastructure in cities, from the need for more bike lanes and more secure bike storage to better safety and traffic laws to reduce cyclist fatalities.
• Confronting Comfort – this is the practice of finding a balance between notions of modern comfort and the urgent need for environmentally responsible solutions that empower us all.
• Hacking The City – transforming the system of a city through informal actions by its own inhabitants.
• Collaborative Urban Mapping – today’s mapping offers the ability to display a plurality of data and information with a high level of precision. Produced through collaboration and open-source data sharing, they contain several layers of information in one single digital source.
• Maker Movement – a participatory, social culture that invites and inspires all kinds of people and communities to invent, build, and hack.
• Skill Share – a platform for individuals to exchange knowledge in order to create solidarity based on cooperation and generosity.
• Feel-Good Urbanism – this refers to the ubiquitous presence of certain frequently used terms that describe positive, politically correct practices in urban spaces and architecture.
• Right To Information – this guarantees Indian citizens the right to obtain information from the government about the activities of any government body or public authority owned, controlled, or substantially financed by the government.
• Urban Sensory Experience – this speaks to the vastly complicated network of human senses and interactions that impact the way one perceives and moves through the city.

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T#Walker 1.0 – Interactive artwork by Rolf van Gelder (2013)

T#Walker is a ‘Tweet-Walker’ (or -crawler): it pulls real-time tweets from Twitter and crawls its own way through the endless Twitter world, following found keywords. An animation will show the tweets, timestamps, tweeter avatars, tweeter location (if available) and QR-codes containing the tweet-links.
Interaction: visitors can influence the flow by tweeting keywords (marked with the special hashtag #twalker2013).

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Playcity Eindhoven

Maak een virtuele stedentrip – ontdek verbanden en speel samen met de vorm van de stad. Menselijke aanwezigheid maakt de stad van nu en de toekomst.
Voorbeeld

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