Watching the Street (Navigator) / citySCENE

Vague Terrain 13: citySCENE has just launched. As editor Greg J. Smith writes:

This issue of Vague Terrain is founded on two notions - that the city is a stage set for intervention and an engine for representation.

The collection expands out from this premise in multiple directions: carto-mashups, projection-bombing, sound walks, psychogeographic imaging and ubicomp experiments. Early highlights for me included Crisis Fronts’ Cognitive Maps and Database Urbanisms, which presents some impressive work on data visualisation and generative models as urban mapping strategies (below: Case Study: Los Angeles). Overall, on a first look, this collection is incredibly rich. It shows that a creative, wired-up, critical urbanism is not just a wisftul aspiration of the technorati, but a real practice.