socks-studio

Marnehuizen is a Dutch false and uninhabited city included in the military camp of Marnewaard, near Groningen.

The city provides the army a stage to simulate future urban combats, emergencies and raids, and it consists of a number of streets, some dwellings, a section of railways with a train station, a bank, a supermarket, a warehouse and even a sewers systems. Europe prepares for what is already happening in Athens and what is probably going to happen again in metropolis under siege like London and Paris.

Marnhuizen represents all cities without being one and it appears strickingly similar to the scenario for Lars von Trier’s film Dogville. From the Funambulist‘s review:

“Dogville, a film from Danish director Lars von Trier (2003), is somewhere in between nowhere (utopia) and elsewhere (heterotopia). (…) This space is just like any other spaces in cinema, it exists outside the reality since it is representing this same reality.”

Jeroen Hofman collected his photographs of Marnhuizen in the book “Playground”
This work has been prefaced by Dr. Pieter van Vollenhoven, member of the Dutch Royal House and former military, which personally used to supervise emergencies simulations and was the chairman, until last year, of the Dutch Safety Board.

Via: Il Post

Here’s how the territory of Palestine has shrinked and borders have fragmented from 1917 to present day. A cartographic essay on GOOD.
Thanks, Ethel, as usual.

Click the first image for a higher resolution:

Italian online newspaper Il Post publishes a report by a group of four Austrian researchers from Wien University, about an innovative statistical method to detect electoral frauds:

It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting:
Statistical detection of systematic election irregularities

Democratic societies are built around the principle of free and fair elections, that each citizen’s vote should count equal. National elections can be regarded as large-scale social experiments, where people are grouped into usually large numbers of electoral districts and vote according to their preferences. The large number of samples implies certain statistical consequences for the polling results which can be used to identify election irregularities. Using a suitable data collapse, we find that vote distributions of elections with alleged fraud show a kurtosis of hundred times more than normal elections. As an example we show that reported irregularities in the 2011 Duma election are indeed well explained by systematic ballot stuffing and develop a parametric model quantifying to which extent fraudulent mechanisms are present. We show that if specific statistical properties are present in an election, the results do not represent the will of the people. We formulate a parametric test detecting these statistical properties in election results. For demonstration the model is also applied to election outcomes of several other countries.

Crossing the percentage of voters with the percentage of winning party’s voters, and analyzing the number of districts by color, Peter Klimek, Yuri Yegorov, Rudolf Hanel e Stefan Thurner traced a sort of poll’s fingerprint, and put into evidence suspect cases and irregularities.

Districts usually cluster around a given turnout and voting level. In Uganda and Russia these clusters are ’smeared out’ to the upper right region of the plots, reaching a second peak at a 100% turnout and a 100% of votes (red circles).

While the report is not of easy lecture if you’re not really into statistics, it shows an interesting use of science to uncover one of the most efficient yet hidden display of tyrannical power.

Read the full text pdf on arxiv.org.

Via: Il Post

“A taxonomy of transition“, (2009) by radical cartographer Bill Rankin is a visual essay on how racial boundaries mark the neighborhoods of a city like Chicago, “where the delimitation of (…) official “community areas” in the 1920s was one of the hallmarks of the famous Chicago School of urban sociology.”

This work uses dot mapping to show populations (Red/Purple is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, Orange is Hispanic, Gray is Other, and each dot is 25 people), hence describing three kinds of urban transitions: stark and precise boundaries, transitions and gradients, gaps.

This project was originally published as an essay in the Spring 2010 issue of Perspecta, the journal of the Yale School of Architecture.

In 2011 it won the MiniMax mapping contest at the “Moving Maps” cartographic biennale in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Astounded by Bill Rankin’s map of Chicago‘s racial and ethnic divides (above), Eric Fisher tried the same kind of mapping on 40 American cities. See here his “Race and Ethnicity” photoset, particularly because high definition images allow an for a better vision of the transitions.

Washingron D.C.: a strong separation between East and West;

Detroit: 8 mile beltway, providing a boundary for Black and White populations;

San Francisco Bay: white predominance over Northern side of the city, while relatively better integration on other sectors of the Bay;

New York: extreme racial segregation, increased by massive density. Possible cross-cultural ferment on boundaries;







LA: low density allows for blending neighborhoods;

San Antonio: even integration between white and hispanic populations.

Via: FastCo Design

Before these days. 1915 to 2010 protests in London.

Destruction of a German shop by Londoners, Poplar High St. 1915





Brit bobbies destroy a communist-built barricade near Mark Lane, opening the street to Oswald Mosley fascist supporters, April 4th, 1936





Communist parade in the East End, 1936





Racial turmoils, Notting Hill, September, 10th, 1958





Pacific demonstration against war in Vietnam, Grosvenor Sq. (US Embassy), March, 18th, 1968





Bobbies free Houghton street from barricades built by London School of Economics’s students. They protested against traffic noise. November, 26th, 1970





Notting Hill Carnival turmoil, August, 31st, 1976





Notting Hill turmoil, September, 1st, 1976





Notting Hill blacks vs. white turmoil, September, 1st, 1976





Bobbies during Notting Hill turmoils, September, 1st, 1976





Bobbies during racial turmoils in Notting Hill, August, 29th, 1979





A crowd during Southall turmoils between antiracist activists and British National Front supporters. Teacher Blair Peach died at 33, 1979





Brixton turmoils, April, 13th, 1981





Fires during Brixton turmoils, April 13th, 1981





Bobbies during Brixton turmoils, April 13th, 1981





Brixton turmoils aftermath, April 13th, 1981





Tottenham clashes arrests, October, 6th, 1985





Tottenham clashes aftermath, October, 6th, 1985





Trafalgar Square’s protests against Poll Tax introduced by Margaret Thatcher, March, 31st, 1990





Poll Tax protests, March, 31st, 1990





Poll Tax protests, (400 arrests and a hundred of blessed), March, 31st, 1990





Poll Tax protests, March, 31st, 1990





Anti-nazi protests in front of BNP’s headquarter in Welling, South-East, April 1993





Environmental and anti-globalisation protests in front of Downing Street, April, 12th, 1997





Aftermath of a parade against privatization of the railway system and against WTO, Euston Station, November, 30th, 1999





Protesters against privatization of the railway system and against WTO, Euston Station, November, 30th, 1999





Police hit by a egg during an anarchist, anticapitalist and environmentalist protest the day before the G20 in London, April, 1st, 2009





Students turmoils against increase in education taxes, London center, November, 24th, 2010





Students turmoils against increase in education taxes, London center, November, 24th, 2010





Bobbies in front of a barricade in Jermyn St. after a parade against Governmental cuts, March, 26th, 2011





Via: Il Post