Urban Explorations

One of my high-priority tasks is to add photos to this blog, to "liven it" up a bit. Now that it's nice outside, I need to get out and take some pictures! Another way that I have been meaning to make my musings more relevant to cities is to write about specific places and issues, though being one person, it is going to be hard to cover a city in any depth, in the way that other websites manage to.

Of course, being a blog not concerned with competition, I can just refer you to those more comprehensive blogs and websites about cities. I've mentioned Gothamist before, and I always like the tone and range of interests there. That site has branched out to other cities, such as Bostonist, Londonist, LAist, though I find the new additions less compelling -- either the sites and stories are less interesting, or maybe I just care less about those cities.

There is a wide range of sites interested in urban issues, if only because those issues range so widely. There is Gridskipper, the urban travel guide that tries a little too hard to be sexy, to the real estate blogs like Triple Mint and Curbed, which probably just are sexy for most people, if only because real estate is what most people in New York fantasize about and fetishize (they need to get out more, too).

For urban planning, there are the broad standard portals, like Cyburbia and Planetizen, which could certainly benefit from an infusion of sexiness. I like better the voices of Atlanta Larry and City Comforts, which always manage to sound ruminative, thoughtful, and still interesting. I also find those blogs less compulsive about "dominating" the discourse or addressing everything: they're just two people with sharp eyes and pens.

There are a lot of blogs about architecture, which I try to avoid for the same reasons why I avoid architecture magazines, they tend to trade in gossip, hagiography, architecture porn, and advertisements for building materials. Metropolis Magazine is good, though it used to be better written, back when they were in tabloid format. If you want to go to the dark side, there is Gutter, a newly founded offshoot of Curbed, which by offering "ill-mannered commentary on the architectural arts," seems prepared not to be taken seriously. One of the better blogs about cities written by an architect is Veritas et Venustas -- his writing is more thoughtful than snobby, which is what I usually associate with classical architecture and the bow-tie crowd.

Most of all, I like the truly weird and wonderful sites devoted to "what the hell?" in cities. I am very fond of the urban exploration webring, "focussing on the art of urban exploration: touring storm drains, abandoned buildings, rooftops, transit tunnels, college steam tunnels and other off-limits locations". A good place to start is Infiltration, which describes itself as "the zine about places you're not supposed to go to." Other places to see where people shouldn't be going are Urbanized, Industrial New York, and Drains of My City, "a frequently-updated website whose focus includes drains, buildings, tunnels, bridges, and any other place I can get into."

Now, you can either read more, get out more, or else crawl down a drainpipe (with friends of course).

Technorati tags: cities and urban