Paris is a bloodshot eyeball, São Paulo spreads out like a watercolor, and L.A. is a glorious mess. You can see how three very different metropolises expand and sprawl in these gorgeous animations produced as part of NYU’s Stern Urbanization Project, examining the growth of cities.
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London’s plan to grow up might go down, Elon Musk’s quest to make electric cars cool, and funny anti-Rob Ford ads appear in Toronto. Plus: Learning from streets in Vietnam, Paris, and Manhattan. All this and more in this week’s Urban Reads.
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Cities change: skyscrapers go up, row houses are torn down, neighborhoods gentrify, earthquakes destroy. Vintage photographs of cities can be fascinating in and of themselves, but the familiar unfamiliarity of these time-warped photographs are especially intriguing.
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Ah Paris—city of light, city of love, city of smog? Unusually warm spring weather has trapped diesel car emissions, blanketing much of France in noxious and dangerous air pollution. It’s gotten so bad that officials in Paris are taking the radical next step of making public transportation, bike shares, and electric car shares free to use all weekend.
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Changes in Red Hook, violence in Kiev, and new ideas for Paris from mayoral candidates. Plus Bogotá bans cars for a week, California might divide into six states, and the surprising history of Hollywood. These are all the Urban Reads you need.
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Artist Etienne Lavie had a lightbulb bursting idea: what if all the advertisements we see on a daily basis in the street, on subways and billboards and so forth were replaced with beautiful works of art? Instead of seeing a C-list celeb shilling a sugar drink or a traditionally beautiful faceless model selling strips of underwear fabric, you’d see paintings and murals. The world would look so much more awesome.
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Abandoned subway stations have long been the playgrounds of squatters and urban explorers alike, but one French politician has higher hopes. Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, a candidate for mayor of Paris, wants to turn them into awesome entertainment and sports venues.
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Public pools in disrepair are sad to see and even grosser to go into. Atlas Sports Center was one such rundown, ’70s-era relic in Paris—a grubby stinkhole that had seen better days—but local firm Yoonseux Architectes transformed it into an ultra-modern spot to strip down and do a few laps (if you’re not doing intervals, because that definitely doesn’t look like 25 yards).
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Paris is the city of love. It’s a city of style. A city of taste. It’s a city where life ballets itself around you. Now imagine that dreamy Paris without any people. Without any life. Without any love. Scary! Claire and Maxime of Menilmonde filmed Paris and deleted people, cars and life from the footage and came with this deeply unsettling short.
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After a short hiatus, during which most of TechCrunch’s Europe-based writers packed their laptops and took off for San Francisco (for Disrupt 2013), the TechCrunch Europe Podcast is back to chew over a few choice nuggets of regional tech news.
On the slate this week, Paris getting its own supersized incubator: aka 1000startups — a massive startup factory that’s backed by Free CEO Xavier Niel. Our own resident Frenchman, Romain Dillet, is on hand to comment, albeit he’s not entirely convinced of the merits of this très grandes model…
Also taking up air-time this week, retail giant Tesco’s Amazon-style move into own-brand tablets with Hudl – as a way to expand the reach of other digital services it’s been trying to sell to shoppers, along with their Tesco Basics’ baked beans.
We also touch on Finnish startup Valkee’s winter-blues targeting headset, which takes the form of a pair of light-emitting headphones. Does it work? Who knows. Might we feel like shining light deep into our ear canals, during a long, dark Scandinavian winter? Frankly, who wouldn’t.
Join host John Biggs, plus TC’s Natasha Lomas, Steve O’Hear and Romain Dillet to discuss all these topics, along with an aside on the finer points of European irony. Background sound effects courtesy of the most fastidious money-counter in Montenegro.
We invite you to enjoy our (quasi-)weekly podcast every Thursday.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
