Show Your Love

Now here's a great use of 2-D web to get a community juiced about where they live. Just imagine these pictures being connected via a continuous urban model you can explore within to find all the food, culture, events, etc. just by walking around virtually.

ILoveProvidence

Nice job of representing my tastes and why I wanted to live here for the rest of my days.

Spreading the Word at Pecha Kucha

The virtual cities theme started off my Providence Pecha Kucha Night #11 talk in Providence on February 16th. Six minutes and forty seconds is barely enough time to get started on topic! So, I provide a longer version on the Web here.

Virtual Tokyo – Towards an Open Source Urbanism

How is Tokyo reconciling the gulf between the development of its urban space and activities in its virtual space?

An interesting article to help us think about integrating the virtual and real better

Wear Blue on June 8th

I plan to wear blue on June 8th. Finally the United Nations has proclaimed World Oceans Day as an official yearly celebration of our world ocean. Earth Day has been wonderful to participate in over the years but the focus has been less on the Ocean than the Earth (as in terra firma). The Ocean deserves its own day. Every time I spin the virtual globe in our Watershed-to-Ocean Initiative, I see mostly water.

It will be great if we all wear blue on June 8th like we wear green on March 17th. Check out the Wear Blue Tell Two campaign if you are interested.

Encompassing the Virtual Watershed

As we get bombarded with news of tragic global warming and climate change in general, it becomes more and more irresponsible to discuss the man-made world without considering the natural. So, I am sold on the idea that any virtual city had better be clearly modeled on the virtual watershed. The EPA provides a Surf Your Watershed application and the USGS provides some lovely GIS Watershed Layers in a KML format (nice for Google Earth presentation). The next step is to generate a complete 3-D model and place our cities within the watershed so we can better appreciate how much we affect the natural world with our building.

Kudos to Erica Naone

Erica's on-line article, entitled '3-D Design for the Masses', is the kind of article I think captures the promise of virtual city building by the masses. She reviews Dryad as the killer interface for mass participation and suggests the interface can only help companies like Everyscape catch on. I only wish I had responded to her e-mail message sooner to add a few quotes of encouragement to you all!

Getting the Word Out

Not too many readers have been engaging me on the concept of virtual cities as a community-builder and eco-friendly resource-saver. Let's see how many of you come to engage through my Technorati Profile.

Supposedly Technorati is the way to go, no? Sure sounds right. Thoughts?