At Spillway, Will Wiles writes about a series of contradictory tensions at the heart of SimCity:

“…there’s a sheer atavistic thrill that comes from playing the game fast and loose, with all sorts of destruction and little thought of consequences. Your urgently needed relief road happens to pass straight through a small, comfortable middleclass neighbourhood? Pah, build it anyway. Sure, you could spend the money on a neat little bus system, but isn’t a glistening motorway just a bit more swanky? Similarly, a vast stadium complex is always going to be more appealing to the ambitious mayor in a hurry, even though a well-funded local library network could yield better results for a fraction of the cost. Huge engineering projects will always be more fun to put together, and more impressive onscreen, than microscopic local initiatives. A mayor should be building suspension bridges and airports – leave the rest to Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.”

[If you are looking for more evidence that SimCity has permanently altered the way we look at cities, then the above view of Shanghai from Chinese search engine Baidu's "dimensional map" is probably a pretty good place to start; seen via @doingitwrong.]

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).