open source urbanism PGH

This was my proposal for Pittsburgh's Civic future. It was for a gallery show that the Pittsburgh Architectural Club on for the Downtown Artwalk. Gerard Damiani reinvigorated this staple of architecture conversation in Pittsburgh. Hey Cultural Trust and Mayor Lukie, hire me for ideas.

Open Source Pittsburgh from nina marie barbuto on Vimeo.

i (keep) making it. ..

Back In PGH. Some Updates.. I have returned to the I Made It! Market, which I helped start with Carrie Nardini. She has been keeping it going since I went to LA three years ago. She has helped it to grow to beyond belief. Now, some things to look forward too!!! Next Saturday we are joining up with Pop Up Pittsburgh to put on a mini-market for the Hilltop communities of Mt. Washington(yes we have one in PGH too), Arlingon, Elliot, Beltzhoover, and etc. That is happening May 15th. THEN! We are having a nothor mini-market May 22 at Venture Outdoors Fest! Then in June, we have a lot going on. We are joining with WYEP, WildCard, and the JCC!
I hope to see you there!

HEALTHCARE.

Something to think about Obama.....
But also.. Hello Health! Social Media and Health Care ... Though one could joke that it's the hipster answer to health care, Jay Parkinson is bringing awareness to peoples door. “Doctors and companies that don’t embrace communication are living in the pre-internet days,”
said Parkinson. This boutique medical practice combs old-fashioned house calls with web-based instant-message and video consultations, online scheduling, and digital records. Digital records, so many doctors offices still have those awful sliding files that are not only an eyesore but tedious for those working with them.
Something to keep in mind:: “Health care’s been taken away from the neighborhoods and become institutional,” says Parkinson. “There’s no incentive to embrace new interfaces for communicating, because insurance doesn’t pay for technology implementation. Instead of waiting on the health-care industry to catch up, we’re doing it.”

So how does this new health care bill help us to work towards something like this?

Art delivery

Some might think that physical systems of information dispersion might be antique with the rise of twitter, iphones, and the new Google WAVE. Buy analog production still has value on our city streets, at least in Berlin. The project called Papergirl has been recruiting young Berliner on bikes to distribute rolls of art work much like an old fashioned paper boy. In 2005 the city of Berlin decided to fine any one pasting posters on public spaces. Aisha Ronninger, an art student, with her colleges brainstormed about how to bring art to public urban spaces. They pass out art in public while riding their bikes through the city. This has now become a well-established happening in the city. Hundreds of artworks on paper are sent from all over the worlds to Papergirl team. Anyone can participate from art students to doodling taxi drivers. They just ask for a minimum of 2 artworks.

"The basic idea with the project is to bring art to the public in a different way from normal; to surprise people and bring them into contact with art in their everyday life.”

I would like to start one in LA. If you are interested in 1. being on the street team or 2. sending art, please email me. nbarbuto@gmail.com

Thanks!

Old men mapping the world.

GO GO GEO WEB! For all you geographers out there, the internet is coming to get you. GIS , Geographic Information Systems, can be very boring sometimes but very informative. GIS and those who deal with it make it accessible to the public via cartography and visualization. By integrating geographic knowledge into daily human interaction can help us all live more sustainable/efficiently/and even socially.
Geographic Knowledge is more than just data:
Its predictions its cartographic knowlege
Meta Data- key for discovery and access
Because of Google and other mapping systems we are all thinking spatially in real time. They need to make the knowledge for the public. At the ACADIA conference I attended last October several presentations were also on this topic. The presentation by Ginette Wessel, Remco Chang, and Eric Sauda was titled:Towards A New (Mapping Of The) CityInteractive, Data Rich Modes Of Urban Legibility.
Their paper proposes a new interactive modes of urban legibility: data space, virtual and physical city, multi-nodal, and information flows.
They conclude that two necessary aspects of any urban visualization are interactivity and the combination of data and geospatial information. Interactivity is crucial because of the fluid nature of our experience and the diversity of individual agendas in the contemporary city. The combination of data and geospatial information reinforces the importance of geometry of the city alone is no longer a reliable indicator of meaning. The modern metropolis is a lasagna of complex overlays of information. The "city as object" has been retired. As much as the city is a living and reacting system, the information that defines or at least translates these transitory systems must be defined by the mailable technology such as twitter and iphone apps.
There was a lecture that Benjamin Bratton gave this past year where he talked about open source urbanism. "For the emergent pairing of urban software and hardware, the redesign of the polis is dependent as the redesign o the city & the redesign o the city is dependent on the redesign of the software, in fact they may likely turn out to be all the same thing." He also said architecture should commit suicide. Personally I am waiting for the jump. You can watch that lecture here. Just click on the video archive link.

Nader Vossoughian gave a lecture at the Berlage Institute in January 2009 titled Open Source Urbanism and the Language of the Global Polis which you can stream here.

What I want to know is how who is mapping what is happening in Tehran right now after the election. The use of "easy tech" aka cellphones to collect the people in riots and other rebellious demonstrative movements should really be documented and theorized. The fact that Facebook was banned in the country for awhile should tell you that the Iranians really know how to use it for its potential. Until then, here's the tweets about it.

LA TEX CITY

SITE 03::
an overpass
999 yale street LA CA 90012

LATEX CITY
MARCH 7TH
2PM

Please make your way to 999 Yale Street LA, CA 90012 on March 7th at 2pm. Go up the giant pedestrian ramp and join up on the overpass. There will be a sighting of LATEX CITY. Come and experience the space! Come see how balloon people dress, feed, and even listen to music.

This time, it's a completely public space.
Help us make this act of open urbanism a reality.