Best Urban Places and Spaces: Update

We’ve been fantastically pleased with progress on the World’s Best Urban Places and Spaces project that Russell Davies and I announced a few weeks ago. We now have almost 200 images in the pool over at Flickr, contributed by 105 of us. It’s fascinating to see how people are interpreting the brief and are generally not following the well-trodden paths to the predictable places.

In ‘production news’ I’m particularly delighted to say that one of my favourite designers, James Goggin of Practise, has agreed to help out with the design of the book(s) of selected places. James is a quite brilliant designer, with a portfolio that includes work for the Tate Modern, Momus, Channel 4, V&A, as well as art directing The Wire magazine, creating the identity for the Docklands Light Railway public arts programme, exhibiting in the recent Forms of Inquiry show at the AA, and check his site for more besides. We’re delighted to have him on board.

We’ve decided to pin a self-imposed deadline of the end of the month (31 January 2008), at which point we’ll do the first selection, for the first edition. So please do join the group, submit your photos, and importantly, please describe the place in a few words, indicating why it’s a special place.

Reminder: anyone can join and contribute images (if you don’t already have a Flickr account, you can sign up for free here. Once you’ve joined the group, use the ‘Send to group’ function above your photo.). You can interpret place or space however you like – that’s part of the fun – and they really don’t have to be world heritage sites in any way. We’ll publish the best in a free downloadable pamphlet form, with a more
stylish printed offering for sale (though free to successful
contributors). And though we do ask for a few words of description, you don’t have to be Jane Jacobs any more than you have to be Berenice Abbot.

You can browse through the entire Flickr set right here (requires Flash):

http://www.db798.com/pictobrowser.swf

Below, a random selection of some of my current favourite images. There are many more great examples in the group, so do take a look and more importantly, contribute.

Here we have a perfect Roman square (by kjpm), the Pike Place Market in Seattle (by peterme), night in Turin (by Luca Vergano), Singapore’s apartment blocks in the trees (by marc0047), a typical Tokyo scene (by Jan Chipchase), a Prague side-street (by jakekrohn), a bus in Amsterdam (by Ti.mo), and a quiet corner of Chengdu (by rogersjones):