Every day at The Overhead Wire we collect news about cities and send the links to our email list. At the end of the week we take some of the most popular stories and post them to Greater Greater Washington, a group blog similar to streets.mn that focuses on urban issues in the D.C. region. They are national links, sometimes entertaining and sometimes absurd, but hopefully useful.
An experiment that lets you time travel in cities: Using new technology, a Google experiment allows a viewer to virtually time travel back in time to explore cities. The virtual open source map allows people to see cities from a birds eye or pedestrian level view of any city dating back to 1800. The next step is creating acurate 3D versions of buildings using photographs. (Nate Berg | Fast Company)
Mexico’s new right to mobility amendment: Mexico has added an amendment to their constitution that supports a ‘Right to Mobility’ for citizens. As roads in the country have become more dangerous, people have been clamoring for greater attention to safe transportation. The new amendment for safe and quality mobility is revolutionary globally. (Dario Hidalgo | The City Fix)
Former police officer films the inner city: YouTuber Charlie Moore films inner city areas by driving his car through the neighborhoods without sound. As a former police officer, Moore took lessons from his past as a beat officer in order to record tours of neighborhoods similar to his own. (Stephen Kearse | The Atlantic)
Company gets $700m for parking lot hubs: REEF Technologies, a company that uses parking lots as sites of corporate kitchens and fulfillment centers raised $700m in venture capital to continue expansion. The company currently operates in 4,500 parking lots with over 100 corporate kitchens and neighborhood fulfillment centers. (Chris Teale | Smart Cities Dive)
Fair housing groups file lawsuit against Redfin: Redfin is facing accusations from fair housing groups including the National Fair Housing Alliance of redlining and discriminatory pricing in vulnerable neighborhoods. The groups argue that Redfin’s policies such as thier minimum price policy demonstrate patterns of housing segregation and are highly racist. (Kurt Schlosser | Geek Wire)
Vanya Srivastava contributed to these summaries
Quote of the Week
“Problems of infrastructure provision reflect long-held and institutionalized ideas of who belongs – and who is excluded – from the social fabric, and the resources and benefits we might take for granted like water.”
Katie Meehan, senior lecturer in human geography at Kings College London in the Guardian discussing research showing how people of color are more likely to not have plumbing in US cities.
This week on the podcast, Anthony Townsend joins us to talk about his book Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car.