The Crane & The Cathedral
Monday, February 05, 2007
Visits to Zaragoza
On Friday morning I jumped on the Ave, (bird), the new hi-speed train connecting Tarragona with Madrid. Somehow they haven’t connected Barcelona yet, that’s supposed to happen in the next year or two. I got off in Zaragoza for a two day workshop on “stories and the city,” part of a larger collaboration between my alma mater, MIT’s urban planning department, and the City of Zaragoza. The plan is to create a “Digital Mile,” a sort of technology park that will integrate the digital and physical environments. They’ve got some exciting stuff planned, take a look here.
As part of the Digital Mile project, and in preparation for the World Expo that will take place in Zaragoza in 2008, they want to jumpstart the larger scale effort with an urban narrative project. On Friday, professors, private sector technology folks, bloggers, librarians, and others gathered to brainstorm and dream a bit of what such a project would look like. They had invited me to present a few options that we had done with Creative Narrations, as well as to discuss some potential other models. The group had some really fun ideas, “mobile poetry, “cans” with microphones and headphones like the old-school cans with string, etc. And I enjoyed myself scheming with the rest of them, figuring out what threads could connect a bunch of smaller projects, what could happen that would be unique to Zaragoza.
Some of the other map-based story projects I’ve discovered since, and before, doing the community map in Somerville are the following. They’re all wonderful, take a look… The Organic City, Murmur, Diari de Barcelona, BdeBarna, and Accessible Barcelona.
I also must mention the “tasting menu” at this beautiful restaurant we went to Saturday afternoon. While I had been planning on taking in a few sites after lunch before my 6:30 train, we stumbled out of the restaurant at 5:30 after having eaten all kinds of delicious plates including the “who would’ve thunk it” seared shrimp and scallops with almond ice cream. My favorite part of the lunch was when one of the MIT graduate students asked one of the guys from Zaragoza if they ever ate a sandwich at their desk for lunch and skipped the multi-course 2-3 hour meal. His response, “Back in 1998, in Madrid, a guy tried to make me do that!” Clearly, he had learned his lesson.
On Friday morning I jumped on the Ave, (bird), the new hi-speed train connecting Tarragona with Madrid. Somehow they haven’t connected Barcelona yet, that’s supposed to happen in the next year or two. I got off in Zaragoza for a two day workshop on “stories and the city,” part of a larger collaboration between my alma mater, MIT’s urban planning department, and the City of Zaragoza. The plan is to create a “Digital Mile,” a sort of technology park that will integrate the digital and physical environments. They’ve got some exciting stuff planned, take a look here.
As part of the Digital Mile project, and in preparation for the World Expo that will take place in Zaragoza in 2008, they want to jumpstart the larger scale effort with an urban narrative project. On Friday, professors, private sector technology folks, bloggers, librarians, and others gathered to brainstorm and dream a bit of what such a project would look like. They had invited me to present a few options that we had done with Creative Narrations, as well as to discuss some potential other models. The group had some really fun ideas, “mobile poetry, “cans” with microphones and headphones like the old-school cans with string, etc. And I enjoyed myself scheming with the rest of them, figuring out what threads could connect a bunch of smaller projects, what could happen that would be unique to Zaragoza.
Some of the other map-based story projects I’ve discovered since, and before, doing the community map in Somerville are the following. They’re all wonderful, take a look… The Organic City, Murmur, Diari de Barcelona, BdeBarna, and Accessible Barcelona.
I also must mention the “tasting menu” at this beautiful restaurant we went to Saturday afternoon. While I had been planning on taking in a few sites after lunch before my 6:30 train, we stumbled out of the restaurant at 5:30 after having eaten all kinds of delicious plates including the “who would’ve thunk it” seared shrimp and scallops with almond ice cream. My favorite part of the lunch was when one of the MIT graduate students asked one of the guys from Zaragoza if they ever ate a sandwich at their desk for lunch and skipped the multi-course 2-3 hour meal. His response, “Back in 1998, in Madrid, a guy tried to make me do that!” Clearly, he had learned his lesson.
