1. BLDGBLOG on the singing ruins of our suburban fever dream.
2. Lewism links Nokia’s plans for mobile phones that would recharge themselves by harvesting electromagnetic radiation out of the air with Nikola Tesla’s derelict tower.
3. Worldchanging reviews the film Garbage Dreams, which tells the story of the Zabbaleen, a community composed primarily of minority Coptic Christians who have traditionally been the informal garbage collection system of Cairo, but have recently faced pressures from multinational corporations seeking to modernize Cairo’s garbage collection.
4. Infranetlab offers a few brief descriptions of strategies against desertification showcased in a recent exhibition at the University of Toronto, Out of Water. Hopefully the publication they mention will be produced, as the projects look fascinating.
5.The New York Times on the evolution of Sarkozy’s planned transformations for Paris from glitzy to gritty:
His answer was … infrastructure. In a speech at the end of April, Mr. Sarkozy said he would leave the dreams of reform to another generation. He said that the state would provide around $50 billion for what he said were complementary proposals for extended subway service that would allow people in the suburbs to travel between them without having to enter Paris, improve existing and saturated subway and train lines, tie some of Paris’s most marginalized and poor neighborhoods into the grid and finally connect all three Paris airports to efficient public transportation.
6. This is a bit older, but I really enjoyed Mario Ballestros’s post on digital urbanism at Where. Mario discusses, among other things, the web canon, networked urbanism, and a digital bazaar in Mexico City known as Plaza Meave.
