Elsewhere

Cincinnati Expands, Streamlines Mobile Food Vending Zone Program: more inexpensive food options are coming to the basin.

How to Resurrect an Urban School District: for all your breeders out there, an article about Cincinnati Public Schools.

Stories from the Pendleton Art Center: the fascinating history of the “World’s Largest Collection of Artists Under One Roof” that’s found right in Over-the-Rhine.

Brooklyn, the Remix: A Hip-Hop Tour: yes.

The Fight against Small Apartments: in Seattle, the micro apartment is considered the new SRO by NIMBYs.

Top Urbanists Agree: Casinos Ruin Cities: excellent analysis by The Urbanophile on a recent kind of urban blight.

Artists Announce They’ve Found All the Beauty They Can in Urban Decay: LOL, speaking of urban blight…

Elsewhere

Cincinnati 2012: how lovely to end the year with a time lapse showing downtown, Over-the-Rhine and much more.

How to Have Your Heart Broken Every Year: on the perils of gardening in Over-the-Rhine.

Paige’s Favorite Things: wow, we’re in a great company in this roundup of Cincinnati-centric goods, courtesy of Cincy Whimsy.

Habitat for Humanity Takes a Modern Tack: inspiring homes built in Charlottesville, Seattle and Portland.

The Oldest Photo Ever Taken of New York City: a daguerreotype of the Upper West Side from 1848.

Strong Towns: “passionate about the future of America’s cities, towns and neighborhoods.”

Unmiserable Cleveland: just that.

The Art of Matte Stephens

Manhattan by Matte Stephens

Portland, OR-based Matte Stephens is sort of the love child of Georges Damin and Mark Coomer, with a hint of Nicholas Takis and a touch of Jim Flora in the mix, sprinkled with a garnish of early Charley Harper. His gouache paintings are very much rooted in the forms and colors of the middle of the 20th century, and I especially like his scenes of different cities.

Elsewhere

Close to Columbus: Over-the-Rhine: Columbus Underground checks out OTR!

my3CDC: Taking Back the Center City!: a response to 3CDC.

A New Park in LA Takes the City Back to Its Natural Roots: transforming an old bus yard into the city’s largest urban wetland.

It’s Not a Fairytale: Seattle to Build Nation’s First Food Forest: just that.

New York Water Tanks to Be Transformed into Works of Art: I’m excited to see what participants Ed Ruscha and Lawrence Weiner do with this, but why exactly is Jay-Z involved?

An “Empathetic Observer” of 1950s New York: the recently discovered work of street photographer Oscar Larson.

Map On, Map Off: crazy self-folding map!

Urban Patterns by Dan Funderburgh

Seattle-born, Brooklyn-based Dan Funderburgh is an artist, illustrator and designer whose pattern work fuses traditional tropes with unusual elements, like this Central Park-inspired damask wallpaper for Flavor Paper.

Looking Back: Best VL Posts of 2009

Here are my favorite blog posts of 2009. The year started with our trip to San Francisco [actually, we returned from it on New Year's Day]. One of my favorite finds there was the beautiful tile at Everett Middle School, pictured above.

Elsewhere

Holiday Gift Guide: Goody Two-Shoes: our seed bombs in Foam Magazine.

Vine Street Circa 1973: courtesy of Fuck Yeah Cincinnati.

Mercer Commons Design Gets Thumbs Down: the struggle to add appropriate infill to the historic Over-the-Rhine neighborhood in Cincinnati.

What’s Your State Good at?: Ohio “currently ranks first in the production of Swiss cheese.” Who knew?

It’s a Google Streetmap of History: How Our Famous Landmarks Looked Up to 170 Years Ago: British streetscapes, now and then.

A Hope VI Gallery: examples from Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Atlanta, Seattle, Philadelphia, Knoxville, Portland, San Francisco, and St. Louis.

Swedish Treehouse Hotel Imitates Shapes Both Real and Imagined: bizarre but respectful architecture suspended among trees in the Swedish village of Hrads.

VisuaLingual Seed Bombs for the Sheraton Seattle Hotel

Our two-person Over-the-Rhine, Cincinnati studio spends a lot of time on seed bomb production, but we recently had a cool opportunity to design a custom pouch for the Sheraton Seattle Hotel. It was a quick, fun project. We produced 200 seed bomb pouches in two different colors, and we’re really looking forward to more custom work like this.

Seed Bombs in Laguna Beach

I’d love to take a road trip to visit our seed bombs in the various stores that carry them. We could go up the Pacific coast, from San Diego, to Santa Monica, to San Francisco, to Portland, and up to Seattle. Laguna Beach would be one of the stops on our road trip, to meet Bev at The Flower Stand.

Woodblock Prints by Lockwood Dennis

5 O'Clock by Lockwood Dennis

Lockwood Dennis is an artist based in the Pacific Northwest, who draws on a rich history for his colorful woodblock prints. His inspiration comes from diverse traditions such as German Expressionist prints, Japanese woodcuts, comic art, and WPA-era industrial design. Dennis works primarily with images of urban landscapes and automobiles of the 1930s and 1940s.