atlas(t)

austin kleon's maps of fictional worlds

austin Kleon has a nifty post about maps of fictional worlds ... primarily made by the authors themselves.

My undergrad thesis argued that world-building wasn’t just for fantasy and sci-fi writers—every tale has a setting, every tale creates a world in the reader’s mind—and it explored ways that drawing that world (visual thinking!) can lead to better fiction.

Some of my favorite “lit’ry” books are accompanied by maps.

I've talked before on this subject and have nothing new to say at this time, but check out the post for images and links to other maps, especially in Kleon's previous posts, and in the comments section.

Via Gwenda.

promises, promises

i'm back, but I'm bad. Tired, fighting off a bug, catching up on work, etc.

What's coming up: I've finished (finally) The Death and Life of Great American Cities and plan on putting a cap on that, blogging-wise.

Also, the Princeton Architectural Press was silly enough to send me some free books (dere beeyootiful!) and I need to do right by them. (I started getting sent a few books over a year ago by folks and never got around to posting about those and I feel extra guilty, so I'm correcting the error. I think ...) They asked me if I wanted the two below and I said yes, and they threw in another one gratuitously, which I reviewed here. (Bet they're regretting that now, huh?)

Right now I'm in the middle of Hyper-Border: The Contemporary U.S.-Mexico Border and its Future by Fernando Romero/LAR. "LAR" is not a verbal ejaculation, much as I would like to do that to my name ("Claire Light/Arrrhhh!"), but rather the architectural firm he founded. And yes, the book required a design firm as co-author; if they offer you a review copy, say yes, is all I'm sayin'.

This book review will be followed by a couple of posts on the theme of the Mexico/US border and art, which have been waiting for me to get my azz in gear.

Next up will be The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and What it Means for the World by Thomas J. Campanella. Very exciting. I haven't been to China since 1993 so I've missed pretty much the whole thing. I'm about due for a visit, and reading this book will be the first step.

After that, dunno. I have some aging ideas about transportation I finally want to get to, but I might get distracted by shiny baubles. Plus, I never keep my blogging promises.

week-long hiatus

yes, atlas(t) is definitely back.

I quit my job at the end of March and have been freelancing ever since, thus the sudden renewed energy and interest in blogging (funny how getting your brain sucked out your ear working 9 to 5 as a database administrator doesn't conduce to inquisitiveness or creativity.) In fact, I'm being paid for blogging now (not this), and might unveil my very own paid blog soon. We'll see.

In any case, I'm going to a convention this week/weekend and will be taking a brief hiatus. And yes, I'm still reading Jane Jacobs at the rate of about one chapter per week. I plan on finishing that damned book on the plane and getting started on the next one, which I may blog about from my hotel room ... or not. We'll see.

Back in a week or two.

Happy Birthday, Walter Gropius!

i don't know if google is way too cool, or if it's the new Absolut vodka, but I found out that today is Walter Gropius' 125th birthday by seeing this googlogo (above).

I associate Gropius with all my atlas(t)y stuff, because the first time I learned about him was when I was a bus tour guide in Berlin and had to mention the Bauhaus Museum as we passed it near the canal bordering the Tiergarten--which building was, itself, designed by Gropius.

(Only a short stretch away was the site where Rosa Luxembourg's body was found in the canal months after her assassination, and in another direction the site in the Tiergarten where Karl Liebknecht was shot as well. I love that these were all contemporaries whose significance is siloed. And Berlin is just chockablock full of historically charged sites.)

The museum/archive is depicted below.

types of mutation

i'm trying to discover the history of the discovery of mutation for my novel.

In the novel, which takes place at the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century, the characters are on Mars without adequate protection from radiation, so they're all dying of radiation sickness and don't know it. (It's complicated.)

When did people start understanding genetic mutation?

In the course of researchy googling, I came across this diagram to the left. I have no idea what it means, but it looks cool.

I wonder, do we have a mechanistic view of the universe because our science makes it seem that way, or do we have a mechanistic view of the universe because our most obvious metaphors for physical processes are machines, and then we draw diagrams that make stuff look like machines?

I don't believe that chromosomes look like this, no matter what you say. LA LA LA LA I'm not listening!

more "squaw" renamings

we already knew this! It's in the title of the Monmonier book! Neverthelessons, here's a quote:

Moves to eliminate the term "squaw" from names of geographical sites are accelerating because of protests that the term is offensive.

The U.S. Board on Geographic Names has renamed 16 valleys, creeks and other sites so far this year. Pending proposals mean 2008 should see more changes than any year in a decade, the board says.

...

Valerie Fast Horse, a council member with the Coeur d'Alene Tribe of Idaho, Montana and Washington, says the usual translation of "squaw" is a profane term for female genitalia. It's so offensive in her tribe, she says, that members refer to it as "the 'S' word."

"They should translate the names into English and see how fast they get changed," she says.

That's what I'm sayin'. Of course, there's always some clown who doesn't get it:

"It irritated me," says Cody McDonald, a Judith Basin County commissioner. "When these things were named a hundred years ago, they didn't mean to offend anybody. … And it's a waste of time. Everybody's still going to call it 'Squaw Coulee.' "

Which is to say, he and his buddies are still gonna call it "Squaw Coulee," even after no one knows what "Squaw Coulee" is, just like that old lady in Berlin who gets into taxicabs and orders the drivers to take her to Adolf-Hitler-Platz.

And yeah, I'm sure the good ol' boys who named the peak "Squaw Tit" didn't mean to offend anybody, either.

Via Racialicious.

 

ice detention deaths

via Zuky, an interactive map showing 83 immigrant detainees whose deaths in detention might be due to neglect or abuse. Click here to engage with the interactive map and read the names.

jane jacobs on discrimination

the effective breaking down of residential discrimination outside a slum, and the less dramatic self-diversification within an unslumming slum, proceed concurrently. If America has now, in the case of Negroes, reached an effective halt in this process and in general entered a stage of arrested development -- a thought I find both highly improbable and quite intolerable -- then it may be that Negro slums cannot effectively unslum in the fashion demonstrated by slums formed by other ethnic populations and population mixtures. In this case, the damage to our cities might be the least of our worries; unslumming is a by-product of other kinds of vigor and other forms of economic and social change.

When an area has unslummed, it is easy to forget how bad it once was and how helpless both the area and its population were thought to be. ... As in the case of other slums, overcoming of discrimination outside the slum, and unslumming within the slum, must proceed concurrently. Neither can wait for the accomplishment of the other. Every relaxation of discrimination outside can help unslumming within. Progress in unslumming within helps outside. The two go together.

The inherent resources necessary for unslumming -- advancement and self-diversification in a population -- demonstrably exist among colored people, including the colored people who are in slums or who have passed through slums, as strikingly as these resources exist among white people. In a way the proved and obvious possession of these resources is more striking among the colored, because they emerge in spite of disproportionate obstacles against their emergence. Indeed, because of the very facts that colored populations advance, self-diversify, and have too much spirit to like ghettos, our inner cities have already lost far more of the Negro middle class than they can afford to lose.

I think inner cities will go on losing too much of the Negro middle class almost as fast as it forms until, in actual fact, the choice of remaining there no longer means, for a colored person, an implied acceptance of ghetto citizenship and status. In short, unslumming is at the very least directly -- as well as indirectly -- inhibited by discrimination.

        --- Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)

thoughts on jane jacobs four: east german cities

one of my favorite blogs, Pruned, also pointed me to this Economist article about former East German cities now being radically depopulated.

SOMETHING odd is happening to the cities of eastern Germany. Plattenbauten, the soulless prefabricated apartment blocks thrown up by the region's former communist rulers, are being knocked down. Occasionally one will be truncated, shorn of its upper storeys. Older streets are gap-toothed where wreckers have removed abandoned houses. Cityscapes are being pruned, removing dead and dying edifices in the hope of saving the rest.

City planners, normally keen to promote the building of homes, factories and roads, are responding to a double demographic crisis: the collapse of communist-era industry, which sent workers, especially young women, fleeing westwards; and a sharp decline in the birth rate.

Those who remain are fearing blight in the empty areas--some emptied by up to 20%. So they're removing housing units by the thousands ... and expensive infrastructure such as roads. Some cities are taking the problem as an opportunity (ogd, I sound like I should have my own DVD).

That may account for the spirit of zany experimentalism that prevails in cities such as Dessau and Köthen. Under the motto “city islands”, Dessau is nudging life and commerce towards “core areas”, which means making a verdant city (which is already three-quarters parkland) even greener.

Traces of Dessau's busier past—a disused tower for smoking sausages or a dairy's chimney now occupied by storks—are being preserved. Parts of the void are being parcelled into “claims” of 400 square metres, which citizens can use free of charge for projects such as growing biomass for fuel. “Where buildings fall, gardens rise,” a hopeful billboard claims.

Köthen, home of the father of homeopathy, is creating a homeopathy library and school, and even employing homeopaths to help cure the city. "On their advice, the municipality [conducted] painstaking interviews to find out how [residents] thought the newly-created space should be used. To provoke a sharper reaction, the city dimmed the street lights, highlighting only the buildings designated for sacrifice." And Stassfurt removed its entire city center, affected by subsidence because of mining, and replaced it with ... that's right: a lake.

Dessau is also preparing an international Bauaustellung or Building Exposition for 2010, a German tradition intended to bring the best architectural and planning minds to bear on new circumstances and changing trends. (You'd better bet I'm going to be there. That's only two years away!)

The article ends with: "From the death of cities, the hope is that new life will emerge," which brings us to the important question:

WWJJD? Dunno, what do you think? Is this situation unprecedented? (Can't be.)  What happens when cities regress back to large towns? Is that even possible?

nasa cyclone nargis flooding photos

nASA Earth Observatory images of Cyclone Nargis flooding Myanmar. Via Sepia Mutiny.