New Tech for Participatory Planning: Grade A for a grey day

The Open Planning Project hosted New Technology for Participatory Planning – an ‘unconference’ last Friday, and what a grade A way to spend a grey day at the end of the week. The crowd was a pretty even split of techies and planners – the Regional Planning Association co-hosted. So the room was full of [...]

Turnstone does Taxis (again!)

The team at Urban Omnibus shines The Architectural League limelight on Turnstone today: Rachel’s in-cab interview with Cassim Shepard, the blog’s editor, from back in the summer, is now available to read and hear, here. It’s one of many discussions about tech in taxis that we’ve engaged in over recent years, and our broadcast debut. [...]

Reporting Back from The Bigger Picture (3): Got any small change?

Here’s the third and final installment of Ben Reizenstein’s round up from The Bigger Picture, part of nef’s Day of Interdependence, which took place last weekend in London: 
I don’t catch the name of the woman who is suddenly standing next to the queue, talking to us, her captive audience, about local currencies in the Welsh [...]

Reporting back from The Bigger Picture (1)

While Turnstone is off to polish a class syllabus, and a massive master (Ms?) list of the trickle-turned-into-a-flood responses to our question about women in tech, it gives us great pleasure to hand the mic over to a guest contributor.
We dedicate the next three posts to a detailed review of the new economics foundation’s Day [...]

Work, not rain, stops play

Strange of us to pick a cricketing phrase for this week’s headline. Occasionally these vestigial Brit phrases burp up from nowhere. Anyway, we’re back. Excuse the silence, we had a spiffy interaction design project to work on at all hours, in collaboration with our London friends at Maoworks, and now we’re back.
Hiding from the rain, [...]

The Bigger Picture: Festival of Interdependence

Last week, a reader of the Turnstone blog posed the question, what’s the next big thing for New York? Zooming out from the Mayoral election myopia for a second, we were looking around for answers to this question, and came across this, from the New Economics Foundation in the UK:
On October 24, London’s South Bank [...]

The real architects of New York City: Rivers and tides

This week’s opening of a new exhibit at the New York Public Library, “Mapping New York’s Shoreline, 1609-2009″ coincides not only with the Hudson 400 anniversary, but also with the online launch of the Library’s map division (up from tomorrow, Friday).
Tracing four hundred years around the edge of Manhattan and upstream, the show, at the [...]

Start Mapping Sense in the City

A LOT going on this week. The Conflux festival is in full swing and the Sentient Cities exhibit has just opened at the Architectural League. With info space meets physical place in mind, we’re excited that there are efforts underway to persuade the powers that be to open up NYC Transit data, along the lines [...]

On yer bike: Learning by others doing

Transportation Alternatives invited Turnstone to act as Counsel (aka Tarantino-style The Cleaner) to both teams of this weekend’s New Amsterdam Bike Slam. The four day event, part of the Hudson 400 celebrations, was inspired by poetry slams and reality TV contests:
Two teams of Dutch and American planners, used to working quietly away on improving air [...]

Art? Museums would rather stick a fork in it

If you liked the train ride to the US Open, have a hundred bucks and an adventurous appetite, head back to Flushing Meadows on September 26 to sample the fayre of the food trucks competing in the Vendy Awards. It’s outdoors, near the Unisphere, and hosted by our friends and client, The Queens Museum of [...]