1. A post on Human Transit points out the “old habits of urbanist thought” that were built into the structure of SimCity. Would be interesting to not only expose the fallacious assumptions embedded in the game, but to ruminate on the ways in which the game, being a particularly late-arriving artifact of modernist urbanism, is a peculiar window into an impossible reality, in which those assumptions are not fallacious but foundational. [via City of Sound]

2. A pair of entries at Next American City’s Daily Report address a pair of issues that Stephen and I have spent some (but not enough) time exploring the potential links between, vacant lots and community gardens. The first entry reviews the 2008 film The Garden, which chronicles the history of the 13-acre South Central Farm in Los Angeles, the largest urban farm in the U.S. for the twelve years between its inception and the eviction of the farmers who had created it. The second notes a study by University of Pennsylvania epidemiologist Charles Branas which demonstrates a strong correlation between vacant lots and violent crime, though I think the Daily Report goes a bit far in the lede in implying causation (“the rise of demolition as a response to foreclosure and abandonment carries implications that extend far beyond the realm of preservation, into the domain of public health”), as fascinating as a causatory link between a landscape of vacancy and criminal behavior would be.

3. Urban Floop collects a few satellite images of and comments on the ship-breaking beaches of India and Bangladesh, which I’ve been meaning to do for years since I read a passage describing them in William Langewiesche’s The Outlaw Sea and realized that Alang and its compatriots must be quite striking from above (I suppose never finding anything particularly useful to say about them is what held me back).

4. Finally, the Sesquipedalist with a late but well-written reaction to the Blueprint assault on blogging (my original posts on that here and here).