Urban Experiences - Fifty People One Question

"Fifty People One Question" is a series of films created by Benjamin Reece of Deltree and Nathan Heleine of Crush+Lovely. By asking one question, such as "Before the end of today, what would you wish to happend?", fifty people need to think of their own answers to the camera. This experiment exploring the connections through people and places, and discovering dreams, losses, stories and secret from person to person.

This is one of the films that took place in Brooklyn, NY, and the question was:
Where would you wish to wake up tomorrow?


Fifty People, One Question: Brooklyn from Fifty People, One Question on Vimeo.

Another interesting question was:
"what's your secret?"
When asked by this question, most people felt shy and might be a little bit embarrassed to answer. Surprisingly there were still lots of people being opened to the question and tell the truth, and it was kind of fun that we can share our little secrets with strangers on the internet.


PostSecret: Confessions on Life, Death and God from Frank Warren on Vimeo.

Urban Experiences - I LEGO NY

Brought to you by designer and illustrator Christoph Niemann "I LEGO N.Y." is an endearing little book that shows bits and pieces of New York rendered with legos. Yep, its as good as it sounds. From taxis to wasabi, the Holland Tunnel to a stack of $20 bills, all are made from Legos and completely adorable. This book makes an excellent coffee table book ( I can attest to this because it currently is sitting on my coffee table)

Lego photos from here
Book photo from SwissMiss

This video is pretty ridiculous but shows a lot of the book with a catchy little tune :)

Urban Experiences - Ethnicity & Tourism Mapping

Eric Fischer has beautifully mapped hundreds of cities. He mapped racial and ethnic divisions in over 100 US cities based on the 2010 census results. These maps reveal such an interesting natural of cities. Some are pretty homogeneous while in others, strict divisions are visible. New York City's map to the left is so interesting to me - you can see Chinatown in downtown Manhattan - and its got a great mix of all different ethnicities. The key for the maps is red is white, blue is black, green is asian, orange is hispanic, yellow is other, and each dot is 25 residents. His whole collection of Race and Ethnicity Mappings is available on his Flickr stream. I think one of the most interesting maps is Detroit - the division from one side to the other around 8 Mile Rd (think Eminem) is pretty intense.

Another of his projects is Locals and Tourists where he mapped photo locations based on geotagging from public Flickr and Picasa search APIs. The photos are then colored coded as locals, tourists or unknown. Multiple photos in the same city over a period longer than a month classified the photographer as local. Its interesting to see the series (130 cities sorted by highest number of local photos) because it shows which cities really are mostly just tourism focused, and which cities have photos by locals too. London is at the top of the list for photos by locals, followed by NYC, San Franciso and Paris.

This project is a derivative of his Geotaggers World Atlas project - which is, of course, also awesome :)





See the full Racial and Ethnicity Mapping project here
See the full Locals and Tourists Mapping project here
See the full Geotaggers World Atlas here