Ecological Urbanism comes to life…
Posted: 8 April, 2013 Filed under: City, Community, External, Human, Population, Sense, Sight, Travel, Urban, Walk | Tags: books, city, eBook, Ecological Urbanism, exploration, explore, Film, Gareth Doherty, Geography, Harvard, Images, Mohsen Mostafavi, photography, Urban Earth Leave a comment »
The latest edition of Ecological Urbanism is terrible doorstop. The first edition is 655 pages, smells good, weighs 2kg and keeps most of my other books in their place. Despite its strengths, it can’t do video… something the latest version on the book can do. The original hardback book by Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty features hundreds of photos that I took while walking across Mexico City, Mumbai and London for Urban Earth, a project in urban exploration that I started in 2008. Out today, the new version splits the book into digestible chapters and includes over 15,000 photographs within the 3 Urban Earth films that I made by taking pictures every 8 steps while crossing these massive cities. You’ll find the films in volume 2, Anticipate, and are accompanied by a short piece of text that Kye Askins and I wrote. I’m delighted to see the films come to life in the book. I hope you enjoy it.
The Ecological Urbanism project has a Facebook page that you can follow here.
What are the greatest British adventures to have with kids?
Posted: 16 March, 2013 Filed under: 125, Country, External, Route 125 | Tags: 125, adventure, Britain, explore Leave a comment »I’m currently planning to take Seb (my 9-year-old son) on a series of adventures to explore Britain. I would love to know where you think we should go and what we should do.
Is there a fantastic place that we should discover or an adventurous way of getting away that we should try? Is there a story or a creature that we should find? Where could we have the very best of experiences?
Please do share an idea or two with me. Many thanks.
How to become a death-defying explorer, like me
Posted: 6 January, 2013 Filed under: External, Human, Sense, Sixth Sense | Tags: explore, first aid Leave a comment »Being an explorer is inherently risky. Asking questions and venturing into the unknown is fraught with dangers, but by overcoming our fears we create seemingly endless opportunities to learn about ourselves and the world around us. Danger is a relative term though. Our perception, knowledge and understanding of “hazards”, our ability to asses and mitigate their risks as well as our motivations for (not) overcoming them vary massively between each and everyone of us. What feels like a comfortable walk in the (world’s largest national) park to one person can feel highly adventurous for another.
This sense of relativity is what convinces me that we are all explorers who go to extremes and accomplish death defying acts (from the likes of this and this). Your extremes may not be to venture to the Earth’s freezing poles, but in our everyday lives we perform experimental and extreme acts that put at risk our jobs, relationships, time and money. My latest gamble was on Sex and the City 2. Despite my best risk assessment I ended up losing part of my life to that film, something I’ll be mourning for days to come.
We are all explorers and as we venture through our life-journeys the best things we can do to increase our chances of survival are to trust aggregated review sites and to learn some basic first aid. I think this video from St Johns Ambulance is extremely powerful.
Getting on a First Aid course is a great idea. If you’ve got a smart phone then I highly recommend this app by the British Red Cross. It’s one of the best ways to become a death-defying explorer, like me.
