There are a lot of tech startups in the Flatiron District
So lets hear it for NYC taking its place at the table of technology innovation. However, we’d love to see how that sort of activity is really influencing the economy. Also, we’d like to know how the economy is valuing that type of innovation.
Take for example, the recent acquisition of Instagram (a company of 12 employees) by Facebook for 1 BILLION DOLLARS (reference: Dr. Evil). We’re happy that these people have allowed us to tweet a sepia toned picture of the last hamburger we had at shakeshack. Maybe some of that creative and tech-minded energy could be better put to use trying to solve the great problems of the day?
We don’t need any more apps that cross-post and multi-tweet the latest coffee shop you walked into. Really, we don’t.
Also, since we’re all about innovation here at Urbanitis, we are also going to take this opportunity to coin a new term: SoMe. Its just so hard to type Social Media all the time. Do you think we can get a cool Billion for coining the term SoMe? I mean isn’t SoMe what social Media is all about?
New York City photographed from the International Space Station 18:21 GMT March 14, 2012.
Paul Strand - Manhatta (1921)
Manhatta (1921) is a short documentary film which revels in the haze rising from city smoke stacks. With the city as subject, it consists of 65 shots sequenced in a loose non-narrative structure, beginning with a ferry approaching Manhattan and ending with a sunset view from a sky scraper. The primary objective of the film is to explore the relationship between photography and film; camera movement is kept to a minimum, as is incidental motion within each shot. Each frame provides a view of the city that has been carefully arranged into abstract compositions.
This is such a bad idea. The High Line has been an inspiring project last years and this project seems so awkward (grandiosity, big names as claim,…) it does not fit the ideas why I like the High Line and what it means.
From Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District up to 30th Street, through the neighborhood of Chelsea, to the West Side Yards, near the Javitz Convention Center.
“It spanned on hundred meter high pillars straight across the American continent. Its interior combined all classical functions of urban life and was connected by a complex traffic system that was differentiated by speed, transportation and distances”
This is straight outta Italo Calvino, I tell you whut.
The Center for Urban Real Estate of the Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation sounds like such a refined academic institution! But apparently it’s pretty much the Heritage Foundation of land use. The direct of the “Center” (funded in part by your developing friends at the Durst Organization!) is a former executive vice president at your friendly local developer the Related Companies, where he still consults. (Just to pick one: guess who’s responsible for the disgusting Gwathmey building on Astor Place? Yes.) And so this oh-so-objective piece in the Times on the Center and, I paraphrase, “wouldn’t it be hilarious if they connected Governors Island to Manhattan with a landfill bridge” and “wouldn’t it be neat if they rezoned to basically do away with the guiding principles of air rights in Manhattan,” is an exceptional launching pad for the Center’s pro-developer “ideas.”
