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 [...]

Reporting back from The Bigger Picture (2)

In this second installment of our review of The Bigger Picture Day of Interdependence, Ben Reizenstein picks up where Anna Minton left off: He too suspects that an impression that it’s the middle class who stand to benefit most from alternative ways of doing things is an illusion worth fighting against. With UK English spelling, [...]

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, [...]

Turnstone Turns Three!

This week, Turnstone turns three!
Thanks to clients, Constellation co-stars, friends, readers, referees and all who’ve kept Turnstone in flight.
We’ve survived trips in what felt like all 13000 NYC yellow cabs (more on that next week), countless rides on the full length of the 7 train line (more of what comes of that in 2010), a [...]

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 [...]

Shake it like a jpg of a Polaroid picture

Having swiped the last batch of unexpired Polaroid stock from a local branch of CVS at lavish expense last summer, we are somewhat conflicted to discover that, after all that, Urban Outfitters is on a one-retailer campaign to get Polaroid film in circulation again. Of course, not news to some, but we’ve not been mooching round [...]

Democracity in action: DIYCity and NYC.is

Susannah Vila, a public policy student at Columbia, has recently released the beta of NYC.is, that invites participant readers to choose, vote up/down on stories they consider important news about New York City. At first glance, we’re thinking of it as the pretty, informed, mutant lovechild of Digg (we love their Labs) and Gothamist. A [...]

New Amsterdam Bike Slam

Turnstone has been invited to participate in Transportation Alternatives‘ New Amsterdam Bike Slam on Sept 10-12. If schedules permit, we’ll be there! As their blurb says:
“Four hundred years after Henry Hudson’s arrival in Manhattan, two teams of Dutch and American planners and designers face off in a battle for the future of New York City transportation. [...]

Documentary by drawing: Josh Neufeld’s “AD After the Deluge”

Back to our favorite “Words that illustrate, pictures that explain” theme here: In the Sacco, 911 Commission, Taxi07, tradition, we’re rave reviewing the latest graphic novel documentary to catch our eye: This time, it’s Josh Neufeld’s “A.D. New Orleans After the Deluge”
 - a cartoon about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Smith Mag has a nice [...]

Strange maps, two tattoos, some local slang and a giraffe

Champions of all things info-graphic, we had a tip-off about the delightful resource of cartographic wonder, Strange Maps. Thought we’d pick this one to feature just so we could inexcusably segue to Colleen Venable’s charming connect-the-dots giraffe tattoo, and even more tangentially, back to Jodie Silsby’s map of the English seaside town of Portsmouth through [...]