more free birds.

read more about the windowzoo project

City of Sound and Russel Davies are gathering photos for their Best Urban Spaces and Places project:

... We're using a Flickr group, so you join that and then send appropriate photos of great urban spaces or places to the group. (Once you've joined our group, use the 'Send to group' function above your photo. If you don't have a Flickr account, you can sign up for free.) Once we've a suitably rich set, we'll filter it down, and publish the best in a free downloadable pamphlet form, with a more stylish printed offering for sale (though free to successful contributors).

For the purposes of this project, I'm not overly worried about the knotty definitions of 'place' or 'space' - or even how you choose to interpret 'best' (the academic within will worry over that, but really, you shouldn't). It'll just be interesting to see what emerges. And I'm also aware that a photo-centric project will not allow much in the way of sound or other sensory information, or memory, but it'll do. Yahoo's maps integration is so clunky that it's not going to be worth fully exploiting that layer, at least initially, but we do ask that you use photo's caption area to describe the place a bit. That would be both useful and informative.

The places and spaces don't all have to have the perceived gravitas of a Piazza San Marco or a Greenwich Village, either. It could simply be a bench, a garden, a market, a tram stop, a library ... it's your call.

Read City of Sound for more information.

This picture is taken from a very cool slideshow, called "The icemen cometh",  I saw at the observer art website.

They asked top artists - from Rachel Whiteread to Will Alsop - to reinvent the snowman...
My favorite one is from the scottish artist David Shrigley, he is such multi talent.
see the whole slide show here

David Shrigley: 'A few years ago I went to St Moritz in Switzerland. I decided to build a non-conformist snowman. When the art collector who owned the hotel saw it he became very excited that I had created an artwork in the grounds of his hotel. I had to explain that it was not an artwork - it was just a snowman. It’s an easy mistake to make'
Photograph: David Shrigley

At least a dozen British towns and cities will have no single ethnic group in a majority within the next 30 years. Leicester will become the first 'super-diverse' city in 2020, then Birmingham in 2024, followed by Slough and Luton, according to a new study of population trends in the UK. The report reveals that Leicester has seen the proportion of its white population fall (...)

Guardian Unlimited, Sunday December 23 2007
Amelia Hill, social affairs correspondent