Blog - Fab City Montréal

Mapping invisible cities

By Patrick Tanguay|2022-06-08T05:05:47-04:0024 June 2021|Territoire|

Three strong trends that are appearing all over the world in multiple domains: What gets mapped or measured gets noticed. What doesn’t, “disappears.” Adjacent idea; various entities, like large corporations and some government instances try to obfuscate issues and information to dissimulate parts of systems. Data is everywhere, being collected everywhere, and often seized or made private when it should have been public and transparently available. In this piece at MAS Context, Olga Subirós explains how these three trends and other factors interact and why it’s important for citizens to create and collect cartographic evidence of invisible cities.

Urban rooms

By Patrick Tanguay|2022-05-31T07:53:50-04:0022 June 2021|Innovation|

Such a fantastic idea! The Urban Rooms Network regroups physical spaces in various cities and neighbourhoods in the UK, where citizens can get informed and involved in where they live and work.

Making cities for people

By Patrick Tanguay|2022-05-31T07:52:59-04:0017 June 2021|Cities|

Jan Gehl is a renowned Danish architect and urban designer who has played a leading role in developing people-centred urbanism across the world. In this interview he talks about Australian cities, but also more broadly about making cities for people. His focus on planning and architecture is perhaps a little further from our normal posts, yet very pertinent through the discussion’s considerations for human scale urbanism, old cities vs new ones, and Gehl’s take on the impacts of COVID, which are worth the read on their own.

Book clubs and doughnuts go great together

By Patrick Tanguay|2022-05-31T07:52:13-04:0015 June 2021|Education|

We’ve already covered the idea of Doughnut Economics a couple of times here so this will be a short post. This book club guide by DEAL with lots of tips to help you read through the book as a group is very well done, so I’m pointing it out for a few of reasons. First of course, because it’s excellent subject matter that adresses a number of our societal challenges, like consumption, inequality, environmental impact, etc. It’s a framework already put into action in a few cities around the world.

Mapping informal settlements

By Patrick Tanguay|2022-05-31T07:51:24-04:0010 June 2021|Innovation, Technologie|

A team at the MIT Senseable City Lab mapped a Brazilian favela with handheld 3D-scanners. I’ll be honest, part of why I’m blogging this is that it just looks very cool! Called Favelas 4D, the project uses point cloud data from handheld LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) scans in order to study the form of Rocinha, a favela in Rio de Janeiro. The low-income urban settlements have complex structures that are built by their inhabitants over time. […] Fajardo entered Rocinha on foot and captured the data with a handheld LiDAR device that uses a laser pulse to measure distances. Tiny points are mapped to locations in space to create a dataset that reveals the intricate details of a 3D environment.