I’m constantly amazed at all the great blogs out there full of insights, oberservations, interventions, photography, etc. The greatest thing about blog is to be able to get those personal experiences from people that live in various spaces throughout the world. Here are a few I’ve been enjoying recently:

Portlandize is the blog of a “computer scientist gone artist/musician/writer who has a great desire to add a little bit of beauty to the world.” The blog focuses primarily on the streetscape and transportation with oodles of photography, video and great observations with a biker bent. This blog is fabulous for documenting the world of a biker in Portland. It’s definitely worth starting at the beginning and reading through all posts. It’s fabulous and definitely my newest fave! I love how he manages to catch great situations like people parking right overtop the new bike box.

He also has a flickr account with a plethera of fabulous photographs of biking around Portland. Here’s one of his most recent videos shot in late April where he got up early and decided to ride around the waterfront trail with a video camera before work. Love it! He rides past the construction site of the new waterfront amphitheater and market plaza which is currently partially open to the public. (I’ll be posting some stuff on that site soon) Check out the video, it’s a lovely morning ride:

And while we’re on the topic of documenting cities from the pedestrian point of view, I want to mention another one of my favorite blogs which, while not new, hasn’t been mentioned on here yet. The blog Citywalker is from Lydia Heard, an urban planner and avid walker living in Seattle. The blog states very simply “I like to walk in cities”. She has documented many places through her travels but most of all, she keeps a close eye on the emerald city from the view of a person on foot.

This is also a blog very much worth starting from the beginning. She also has a massive flickr account with over 37,000 photos from around the world. Not only does she make keen obersvations about the world revolving around the urban pedestrian and fabulous details many people might normally miss but since she is constantly documenting through photographs, she can makes observations through time like her post on the cleaning up of Seattle’s alleys: Evolution of an Alley.

image via Citywalker

Emergent Urbanism is the blog of Mathieu Helie, a Canadian urbanist with an interesting degree combination of a Masters in Urban Planning and bachelor’s degree in Economics and Computer Science. His interest in cities is therefore a bit more scientific in approach looking at systems, organization and the science of emergence. From the site: “Urbanity is the cooperation and mutual-support of large numbers of people in close proximity. It is inevitably emergent, and to understand the science of emergence is the key to inventing the first fully emergent urbanism, capable of resolving all the complexities of a 21st century, sustainable city.”

In his latest post, A Pattern Language for New York Streets, Helie writes about a topic related to my most recent post about New York City streets. The NYC Department of Transportation has published its street design manual, a project lead by “traffic anti-planner” Janette Sadik-Khan who is also responsible for the most recent pedestrian mall through the closure of parts of Broadway to vehicular traffic.