Editors and writers
We’re looking for talented writers; inspired people who like to be part of our editorial board. Applicants should have great analytical capacity and good written English language skills. Besides that, they’re extremely interested in innovations in the urban context or related subjects. You will have a free position, writing autonomously and being able to build an own group of readers and a network of informants. Furthermore, you will be a full member of the editorial board, which means we’d love to discuss general Pop-Up City developments with you, as well as possible new topics and formats.

What do we offer?
For now this job is unpaid. However, we can offer a huge and growing audience of more than 1,800 daily readers. The Pop-Up City is a platform to get your ideas spread. It offers writing and blogging experience and plenty of network opportunities. Being an editor of Pop-Up City is not related to any place. We’re based in Amsterdam, but new editors can write for the magazine from all over the world.

Wanna join us? Please write us a short message with your resume and motivation. Please send your email to studio@golfstromen.nl! Deadline for applications is October 1, 1010.

This city campsite was no enclosed enclave but truly intertwined with life in the town. Artist Sabrina Lindemann has collaborated with Amsterdam-based DUS Architects and graphic design office Duel to transform the public domain into a huge campsite. As such, CityCamp Castricum is part of the North Holland Art Biennial 2010… Yes, yet another biennial. For those up for a true urban camping shower experience, DUS Architects designed the grand shower house located at a public green in the centre of Castricum. The temporary building is perfectly waterproof, as it is made entirely out of plastic airbeds. Unfortunately, the event suffered from some poor weather conditions over the last ten days. Heavy rainfall and wind must have afflicted the CityCamp initiative. It’s still unclear whether the shower house has survived these stormy days.

The so-called Wi-Fireworks project provides a free Wi-Fi connection. Once people are connected with the network through their phone, the installation redirects the device to an HTML5 page that enables them to make a drawing with their fingers. Whatever they draw on their screens, appears on the windows of Unit9. Click explode, and watch your doodle explode as a firework. Visit the project website to watch a video of Wi-Fireworks.

“This creative, ‘green’ solution makes a piece of derelict land into something that can be used by local residents and office workers as long as there will not be built”, the municipality explains. Besides the labyrinth the temporary pleasure landscape also contains a public tennis court that will be opened next month.

According to a German newspaper the sign hopes to stimulate local youth to behave a bit more quiet while sitting and drinking on the square surrounded by family houses. The ‘Säule der Toleranz’ is switched off most of the day. At 8 PM it turns totally green, which means activity such as drinking and making music is allowed. Slowly it changes color. At 11 PM the whole pillar is colored red, which means that any loud activity is forbidden. As far as my one night observation goes, the pillar doesn’t work for this last bit. It’s used as an argument to use Augustinerplatz as an open air pub, with a great atmosphere stressed by cosy red light. Which makes it a great place.

In the past the company predominately produced vehicles for milkmen and mobile shops. Since the rise of the supermarket these shops have mostly disappeared. At this moment a lot of Spijkstaal vehicles can be bought at different auction websites for very good prices. Here we’d like to present a collection of rather remarkable vehicles made by Spijkstaal throughout history, with special thanks to collectors of  Spijkstaal on Flickr.

Halverson’s frustration about Foursquare or any other venue check-in application, is having to remember to actually check-in when you arrive at some place. This led him to develop a prototype of a Nike shoe check-in plugin for Foursquare. Instead of having to lug around your laptop, or connect to the local WiFi, you could also have your Nike shoes (or sensor in generic shoes) check in for you.

“The backend device would need to be located in the venue, but it is internet-independent, low power, and can be located anywhere in the world. (…) Currently, its on an electronics bread board and rather bulky, and it talks to Foursquare directly…but it (mostly) works.”

1. Make a mix CD or mix tape. Feel free to decorate the cover and/or leave a note inside and contact/email, Facebook, MySpace etc.
2. Drop of the mix to the DJ stand upon the entrance.
3. Have a drink, sit down (or stand, your preference), make conversation, party, dance, unwind, enjoy your night, make new friends.
4. When you leave, return to the DJ stand and pick up a mix that someone else made… then listen!

Making a mix tape with a self-designed cover is the best way to express affection for somebody. At least that’s how we managed our fear for girls back at high school. Covers of those mix tapes once were mostly small pieces of home-made art. On the Flickr group page Creative Cassette Covers these are collected, with some great designs among the contributions. More into the digital era, there’s a group that collecting covers of both mix tapes and CDs.

Besides the fact that this is a rather interesting marketing strategy by Volkswagen (campaign for the Polo GTI), it’s also interesting to see an upcoming stream of projects which intend to separate different spaces in our modern society. Earlier we blogged about the Tourist Lane, a prank by NYC’s Improv Everywhere group, and about Fast Lane/The Slide, which was also a project by Volkswagen.

Some want it slow, but they tend to forget that others want it quick. In fact the escalator was once designed to speed up things a little at urban nodes. In hasty London this seems to work out, thanks to the signs telling people to “stand on the right”. In most other cities they only cause major congestion thanks to ‘the power of the slowest’.

“I am exploring how nontraditional public spaces – like sidewalks – might be easily transformed into lively places to lunch. This blog follows a series of Pop Up Lunches I have staged (some big, some small) and my development of mobile eating tools designed for the sidewalks of NYC. Ultimately, I hope that my efforts might inspire even a handful of my fellow urbanites to reconsider the potential for lunch – to be a joyful daily event – and for the sidewalks of NYC to serve as more than just pathways. This project was all part of my Master’s thesis as a graduate student of Industrial Design at Pratt Institute.”

One can walk from the one ‘ascenseur public’ to the next while using a pattern of hallways. All are very properly maintained and working as a necessarily attribution to the sidewalks, leading the pedestrian from the high parts of the city and the parkings to the lower harbor. I’ve always been curious why this vertical dimension of public space is not been fully used at other places. Most cities lack a modern vertical public infrastructure. Their services are stuck to archaic inventions such as stairs, while later innovations are already for years in use within private spaces.

Monaco is a rich city (which explains a lot), unless the fact that the city doesn’t earn any money from income taxes. The Principality earns from property sale (very expensive here) and VAT. The high property prices could be another explanation for the elevator structure, as elevators need less space than stairs. Anyway, I like the public elevator structure. It’s innovative, fascinating and exciting to be in. They are extremely good for a series of pop-up parties as well (with a bar in every elevator). Nevertheless, it mostly reminds me of the online first person shooter Wolvenstein Enemy Territory, which I used to play. It would be great if Monaco with its public elevator structure would be model for a new battlefield.

The Genovese authorities have to deal with some big companies along the expensive shopping lane, all having their own famous logos and advertising methods. Here the local government has obviously won the battle about the character of public space. Even big companies such as McDonald’s had to adapt to the Genovese light style.

Some days ago Urban Shit and Rebel Art wrote an interesting post about a guerilla advertising exhibition in Vienna. The collective Phorm organizes an exhibition called GEWITZTA, which deals with the issue of ownership of the city’s visual space. Along the project comes a ‘DIY Reclaim Your City Kit’. This box enables people to, for instance, hack a city light poster. The key which provides access to the poster box is copied and spread as a part of the DIY kit. The project is called GEWITZTA after the name of the Austrian company organizing the public advertising Gewista.

“The name GEWITZTA is a wordplay. The company that owns nearly all the advertisement areas in Vienna is called GEWISTA and the modification to GEWITZTA means “shrewd”. So that is of course an artistic attack against the monopoly of a huge advertisement area providing company. In Austria free placarding is anchored in the right of freedom of expression but the company which is providing the areas for advertisement wanted to make a monopoly on this and remove every poster (placarded by e.g. small cultural institutions) to achieve that those institutions had to pay high prices for placarding in the city. This affected political movements as well. For there are nearly no free areas provided by the city and the company for placarding.”

Richard Hardy, a recent graduate from the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, has produced a couple of very interesting movies exploring the future of our cities. This one, featured on BLDGBLOG, is called the Transcendent City, and speculates on the question whether the conception of artificial intelligence has been a necessity in human evolution and if we therefore should embrace emergent technologies to engage with problems of sustainability and the city. The video shows a dreamy world, a forest with artificial flowers dancing in the digital wind and amazing constructions that somehow remind us of a mix between Archigram’s Walking City and the fantasy world of 3D movie Avatar.

“The Transcendent City is an autonomous artificial machine that extends across the earth adapting to the natural eco-systems it encounters while deriving its energy from the renewable resources available at each particular site. The systems desire is to maintain homeostasis within itself whilst maintaining homeostasis within the greater system, Gaia. Its processes are engineered on the molecular scale by nano technologies controlled by molecular computers that monitor and analyse the environment.”

In France and Italy this promise is rather misleading. Lights signs are not the exclusive visual expression of entertaining bars, shops and gambling halls, but are most glaringly used by pharmacies — a function which we can generally consider rather boring. One of the most remarkable element characterizing French and Italian cities is the pervasive presence of the animated green crosses telling us there’s a pharmacy. In fact these signs visually dominate the French and Italian streetscapes. They’re heavy and there are exorbitantly many of them. But they make the street look interesting!

Why should pharmacies make so much visual noise to attract clients? Is it because there are so many of them (one after every 200 meters), which causes a rather heavy competition, or is the visibility of these health services collectively considered important?

A possible answer might come from an Italian professor in urban planning who studied the relation between medicine use and environmental problems at cemeteries. He once told me about Italian grave yards. As medicine use in Italy is among the highest in the world, cemeteries suffer immense pollution problems. All medicines consumed in the last years before passing away go with the body and leave a chemical residue. Even more remarkable are the spatial problems caused by the collective medicine addiction. Bodies are over-conserved and don’t rot because of excessive use of medication. This causes spatial problems on the cemeteries where graves are usually planned to be re-used after a certain period.

What the ancient Egyptians did with their mummies and the Russians did with Lenin, is what modern South Europeans do with themselves, with a little help from the local pharmacy.

Most interesting in fact is to personally experience the obsolescence of modern architecture. The first observation is the fragrance in the building — strange, but familiar. It reminds me of the elderly apartment complex my grandmother lives in. It combines two main elements: the typical aroma of common spaces in concrete apartment blocks, and the odor of predominantly older people. It doesn’t smell, but it’s far from fresh and doesn’t represent the clearness as showed on the pictures in the architecture books. Would Le Corbusier have ever imagined that his modern architecture would smell old-fashioned? It’s not strange though. The modernistic buildings has become mature, and the people that want to live in this predefined modernity did so too. The concrete is of the oldest type and the dark brown wooden workmanship inside the building is well preserved, but in contemporary perception typically traditional. In fact the whole building breathes as an old-timer when it comes to the lifestyle of its inhabitants, its fragrance and the building materials.

On the third floor, where the hotel is located, a traditional restaurant, a traditional bar and pastry bakery, an art gallery and an architecture book store can be found. It’s interesting to see how an architecture book store can survive on the third floor of an apartment complex, situated pretty far from the city centre of Marseille. But that’s only because most hotel guests are architects themselves.

In fact these services on a third floor only work in the modern society as perceived by Le Corbusier and some of his disciples (a world in which people were considered a main production element in an industrialized working economy) but the world has changed in another direction. So did the average body length. Okay, I’m 1.95 m. (which is quite tall), but that immediately makes everything in Unite d’Habitation pretty narrow. This becomes clear when measuring myself with an original Modulor, Le Corbusier’s own proportion system, which is rather famous among architects. One thing we should compliment the architect with are the concrete desktop tables constructed as an integral part of the balconies, which are definitely timeless. They’re most certainly still the best place for laptop workers in the warm climate of Southern France.

“Invisible Cities maps information from one realm—online social networks—to another: an immersive, three dimensional space. In doing so, the piece creates a parallel experience to the physical urban environment. The interplay between the aggregate and the real-time recreates the kind of dynamics present within the physical world, where the city is both a vessel for and a product of human activity. It is ultimately a parallel city of intersections, discovery, and memory, and a medium for experiencing the physical environment anew.”

“The semacode is a visual code that codes character strings (just like the QR code, J.B.). It was planned to graphically code weblinks. The thus extracted pixel graphics can, for example, be retranslated from camera mobiles into URLs. With ‘Hello, world!’ the code serves as a kind of branding of a digital culture whose omnipresence is obvious, yet whose modes of action are unknown in wide parts of society.”

On the website of this great landscaping project, Hopfengärtner provides a KMZ file to see an areal view overlayed in Google Earth. Click here for a photo set on Flickr about the realization of ‘Hello, world!’.

“Because of the increased commercial interest of paving public space with digital advertising screens the need for accessible intervention devices seemed obvious and necessary. The wish and habit to comment (tag) the surrounding world is also an ancient and still vivant phenomena we try to preserve. (…) People shall not only remain as a passive audience, they must obtain the privilege and beside that the right tools to create their own multimedia content in the streets. The more and more mushrooming media facades, LED supplied walls and huge projections are interesting and worthy technical innovations for the people, but in contrast to the old-fashioned posters in the streets, it is nearly impossible to create own content for these facades or even hang up your digital video.”

The SMSlingshot consists of a projector-equipped minibus and of course the device itself, which is equipped with an ultra-high frequency radio, a hacked Arduino board, a laser, and batteries. Visit the project website to learn more about ‘the making of’.

The Banpo Bridge itself forms a double deck bridge as it is on top of the Jamsu Bridge. When the water level rises too much, the Jamsu Bridge covers with water and gets closed. The lower deck contains pedestrian and bicycle paths that provide easy access to the Banpo Hangang Park on the North side of the river. The Banpo Bridge is a girder bridge and was completed in 1982.

Made from a mixture of clay, compost, and seeds, seed bombs are becoming an increasingly popular means combating the many forgotten grey spaces we encounter everyday, from sidewalk cracks to vacant lots and parking medians. The machine helps people to temporarily reclaim derelict urban sites and transform them into green, peaceful spots.

“Whether you’re a business owner, educator, or just a concerned citizen we’d like to work with you to get Greenaid in your community. You can purchase or rent a machine (or two, or ten…) directly from us and we will develop a seed mix as well as a strategic neighborhood intervention plan in response to the unique ecologies of your area. You then simply place the machine at your local bar, business, school, park, or anywhere that you think it can have the most impact. We will then supply you with all the seedbombs you need to support the continued success of the initiative.”

The project website features a short video which explains more about the initiative. As you can see on this map, the Greenaid seed bomb vending machines can already be found at a number of locations throughout the United States. Click here to become a fan on Facebook.

The idea is pretty simple. Anttenna allows its users to post to supply or demand chains. Listings can be sorted by filters like keyword, category, location, and proximity. Mapping in Anttenna makes it easy to connect with people that are physically close to you. Communication between users goes through Twitter, and the developers have a fancy word for that: ‘Anttweeting’. In this article on Springwise, CEO and co-founder Marcus Wandell explains:

“With the exception of posting ads online and making them searchable, classified ads really haven’t evolved all that much since they were introduced 300 years ago. Anttenna fully leverages the smartphone platforms and new communications standards to give people a whole new way to use classified advertising. Anttenna delivers a constant stream of hyperlocal, real-time listings, always relevant given the moment and location in which they are seen.”

The service is currently available in most metropolitan areas in the United States and Canada, but it is expected to arrive at the other side of the Atlantic in the near future. The video below explains more about the initiative.