010_yellow man

[IT] One of my favourite hobbies is collecting pictures of pedestrian crossing light from all over the world. Do you know that they all look different? For example, the red and green men in Tokyo wear a hat (the Japanese are in the detail as usual) while the green man in Kuala Lumpur is animated. This one in the picture was taken from Rome. Note that they have a yellow man!

009_public privacy

[NL] Have you ever thought of how public a toilet can be? Check out this male public toilet I found in front of the Amsterdam Central station. It seems a very normal thing for the local people there. A guy can use it even when cute girls are around and all the girls can just walk past the guy without being shy. Well, I decided to give it a try for a new experience. Only one complaint though, the urinal was a bit too high…

008_street light

[BE] There is something particular about streetlamps in Brussels; they are mounted on the buildings. As an architect, it would be quite a heart-broken feeling to see your building, with façade that you spent many late nights detailing it, ruined with that extra element. Look closer at the picture, if you can, they run the wires across the building, too!

007_over the water

[NL] The Dutch are not only good under water level, they are also great over the water. In order to perform a construction of a row house by a canal where there is no solid and dry ground available, scaffolding is set up as a temporary platform for standing of equipments and storage for building materials.

006_shitscape

[FR] When you are traveling in Paris, don’t enjoy too much with the nice weather and charming architectures. Once in a while, you should pay attention to where you are walking. A lot of pedestrian walkways in Paris are full of doggie droppings. In movies, they only show sexy Parisian women with their poodles flaunting on streets but never reveal the ugly side of the story. Those cute little dogs all need to poo.

005_mapping the invisible

[NL] I love snow. It reveals some invisible urban flows such as this one in the picture, almost like a mapping diagram of space in time. We can see which car came to park first by looking at the amount of snow covering the car. The fresher tire tracks leave deeper impression on the road and the shapes of the car (the uncovered area) on the parking lot dissolve through time after the car has left.

004_smart

[DE] Are you a kind of driver who find parallel parking pain in the ass? Well, complain no more, smart car is the solution to your problem. With its length at 2.5 m., you can park your car nose-in anywhere. It is possible to park 2 or 3 smart cars in a normal sized parking lot. Imagine, all American cities where planning is driven by the culture of automobile would have looked different from what they are now if smart cars were widely used in the past. Check out smart car’s official website at www.smart.com

003_colourful bikes

[NL] The most popular mode of transportation in the Netherlands is bicycle. Everybody owns at least one bicycle. I had one as well when I was living there. Riding bicycle is a part of local cultures. The Dutch even have a joke on the German about bicycle. “Give me back my bike!” they say. Rumour has it that the German soldiers stole bicycles from the Dutch to ride back home after the WW II. Bike stealing is no.1 crime in Holland. Sometimes when you see a colourful bike, it doesn’t mean the owner try to be funky but to change the look of the stolen bike. If you hang around a city square long enough and it's your lucky day, you might be able to buy a bike from a junky as cheap as 5 euros or even less. (I once wrote an article called ‘I want to ride my bicycle…’ long time ago at http://udcu.tripod.com/chai03.html. Check it out.)

002_cultural cocktail

[BE] We all know that one of the strongest points of the European Union is its great variety of cultures. Different languages are spoken even within the same country, for example Belgium; people from the northern part mostly speak Dutch while their country fellows on the lower part of the nation prefer French. The majority of people in Europe can speak more than two languages. This makes transnational culture, economy, labour, technology and whatever effortless. (Singapore is also a multilingual nation, see 003_multi-cultural society at http://urban-o-mania.blogspot.com)

001_koninginnedag

[NL] Koninginnedag is Queen’s day in the Netherlands. On 30 April of every year, Dutch people will dress up in orange and get out of their house to celebrate this national holiday outdoor. It is an interesting phenomenon to see Dutch urban landscapes filled up with orange colour everywhere. The colour is a symbol of the nation, which stems from the royal family name – The Family Nassau, House of Orange. A similar spectacle could be found when the Dutch national football team hits the stadium. Learn more about koninginnedag at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koninginnedag