DIYcity

My Institute for the Future colleague Anthony Townsend is collaborating with Outside.in's John Geraci in a new effort for hacking the urban environment. DIYcity is having its first NYC meet-up tomorrow, January 14, at 7pm at the Project for Public Spaces. I'm really looking forward to how the project evolves! From the overview:

Intro: How do you want to reinvent your city?

Twitter bots, aggregators, social software, mobile apps - we use these things more and more in our daily routines to make our lives better. But can we also use them to remake our cities altogether? How can these technologies be applied to transform urban spaces, changing them from the centralized, hard-coded things they are today into finely-tuned, fluid, user-operated systems that are efficient, sustainable and fit for life in the 21st century?

DIYcity is a place where people figure these things out by actually building and launching applications that address the problems around them.

DIYcity

UPDATE: Sean Savage says there's a DIYcity meet-up in San Francisco tomorrow, too!

[#1 posted by Gaudeamus , January 13, 2009 6:02 PM]

This looks very cool. As usual, however, there's nothing happening in Las Vegas. Vegas is so behind the times. All we have is CES and the Adult Entertainment Expo. I'm going to keep an eye on this and hopefully I'll see Sin City on the list in the future.

[#2 posted by Cicada , January 13, 2009 7:29 PM]

Call it a personal opinion, but the best way to deal with the problems of cities is to not live in one.

Assuming you don't need to be constantly entertained, there's much to recommend it.

[#3 posted by John Geraci , January 13, 2009 7:36 PM]

@cicada, that's perfectly fine, though cities are much more efficient living spaces on the whole than any other mode of living. the problems associated with cities only seem to loom larger b/c there are so many more people living in them per square mile. overall they're much more efficient than either rural or suburban living.

@gaudeamus - you've got to start a DIYcity in Las Vegas yourself! that's how it works. none of those groups was started by DIYcity itself, all were started by local residents. go start DIY Las Vegas now!

[#4 posted by glowlab , January 14, 2009 2:36 PM]

Glowlab hearts DIYcity -- we're in.

[#5 posted by Cicada , January 14, 2009 8:04 PM]

@3 That presumes that efficiency's your goal rather than (certain types of) comfort. And as you point out, if you consider crowding to be a problem, by definition you have it in a city.

Elbow room's a benefit.