Remember Hövding, the Swedish bike helmet released a few years back that looks like a stylish, poofy collar and supposedly inflates like an airbag upon impact? In a new video, the company explains more about how it works—claiming it’s actually much safer than a traditional helmet.
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Ten years after photographing countless storefronts for their popular book, Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York, James and Karla Murray are returning to the same addresses for an update. The contrast in the pairs of images, each a decade apart, is striking.
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Sprawl is inconvenient, ugly, and permanently damaging to the environment. And it can also make you sick. A new study shows that sprawling metropolitan areas not only force residents to live farther from where they work and shop, but could also be causing them to lead shorter, unhealthier lives.
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Ever been to Bjørndalen? No, of course you haven’t: This tiny town, located in a remote area of Svalbard, the Arctic archipelago controlled by Norway, has more polar bears than humans. Curiously, it’s also home to some of the country’s fastest internet speeds.
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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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Airbnb announced today that it will begin charging San Francisco’s 14 percent hotel tax on reservations in the city, starting this summer. The taxes will be paid by guests. Last week, the company announced a different partnership in Portland, Oregon, where Airbnb itself will pay some city taxes.
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Growing outrage against the Guggenheim’s new museum in the United Arab Emirates kicked into high gear this week: Protesters stormed the Guggenheim’s New York location for a second time, and a fake website launched claiming to solicit new, "ethical" ideas for the museum’s design.
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No less than six patrons of the Port Orange Library in Florida have been attacked by a pair of book-hating hawks over the past week. Now, the library is protecting its brave bibliophiles the only way it knows how—with umbrellas.
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The exterior of this brick home in Amsterdam was transformed by Studio Wessels Boer into a large-scale curio case to commemorate its role as one of the original Dutch "dime buildings," an early, 1870s-era attempt at cooperative housing. Each of the custom-made cut-outs tells a story about either the history of the place or a personal narrative from a current resident. [Lustik]
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When patience is short and waits are long, squeezing onto the bus becomes a mad, lawless scramble. And that won’t do if your buses have to transport 100,000 passengers a day, like Vancouver’s extremely busy 99 line. So transportation planners got out a camera and some tape—you can watch the results in this transfixing time-lapse video.
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