Happy New Year for 2010 from the Capital Style blog.

In 2009 we switched from generic hosting to a local UK host, and we’re pleased with that move so far.

It’s difficult to say at this point what will happen in 2010 as far as mutiple niche or general type blogs are concerened, so we’ll just have to see what happens.

Tags: blog, capital style, happy new year, niche, UK, uk host

Gwen Stefani attends the world premiere of Sherlock Holmes held at The Empire Leicester Square on December 14, 2009 in London, UK.

Tags: Gwen Stefani, Gwen Stefani Style, Style

BERLIN – NOVEMBER 09: A general view of celebrations at the Brandenburg Gate on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 2009 in Berlin, Germany. Germany is celebrating the fall of the Wall, which led to the end of stalinist rule in East Germany and later to the reunification of East and West Germany, with an event that includes the toppling of 1,000 giant dominoes to symbolize the end of stalinist rule across Eastern Europe.

Tags: anniversary, berlin, Berlin Wall, Brandenburg Gate, capital cities, celebration, fall, General View, germany, horizontal, International Landmark, one, People, politics

Queen Rania of Jordan visits the Borghese Gallery in Rome, Italy, on October 20, 2009. Jordan’s King Abdullah II and his wife, Queen Rania, on Monday departed for an official visit to Italy at the invitation of President Giorgio Napolitano.

Tags: 20, 2009, Abdullah, Borghese, Departed, gallery, Giorgio, ii, invitation, italy, jordan, Jordan's, king, monday, Napolitano, Newscom, october, official, photo, president, queen, Rania, Rome, visit, visits, wife

It has to be theatre breaks in London

Capital Style has taken us to Paris and Florence, Barcelona and Berlin but for musicals it has to be theatre breaks in London. There’s nowhere outside the West End that has the same buzz, class and choice as theatreland London, and you get the convenience of the capital being an international travel hub with all connections, terminals and networks centred on the English city. London has the best choice of shows as well, and a huge hotel and hospitality sector, so it’s often possible to get the best all in package deal from regional centres for theatre breaks in London with top tickets, posh Hotel and otherwise expensive discount rail travel included.

New theatre shows in London

In the autumn season there are usually a few  brand new shows coming up and this year is no exception. Sister Act is a new show this year, and starting to settle in well by all accounts with Patina Miller doing a grand job as the diva.  Another big show that’s arrived on the London theatre scene is Priscilla Queen of the Desert and then it doesn’t seem like it but Oliver has only been going for about a year!

The one we’re all waiting for though is called Love Never Dies, and that’s going to be a sequel to Andrew Loyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera – something that’s pretty unique in the theatre world, do you think he will pull it off?

Hotels for Theatre Breaks in London

When you book theatre breaks in London you get offered a wide range of hotels, depending on the dates and show you have chosen. One way to choose is by trading off the price range for proximity to the theatre where you go to see the show but that’s not always the most important factor. For example, there are hotels near Victoria that are dead handy for Wicked and Billy Elliot but if you intend getting out and about a bit more while you’re in town then it might be better to be somewhere like the St Giles Hotel which is right on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road.

Billy Elliot theatre breaks in London

Tags: theater breaks in London, theatre breaks, theatre breaks in London

London is leading the way with an art project in the capital that sees 2400 people each stand on the fourth plinth in the famous Trafalgar Square for an hour each.

This is leading artist Antony Gormley’s brainchild, and is causing a stir with a much wider audience through the live webcam feed which is attracting a lot of commentary on twitter.

The lucky ‘plinthers’ have been selected at random from those that chose to apply, or knew about it, and so far it’s thrown a variety of different approaches although with a certain similarity. The effect has been dubbed like ‘a middle class big brother’!

Tags: antony gormley, fourth plinth, London, trafalgar square

West End Live

West End Live is an event that takes place in the UK capital, originally based on a New York Broadway event. London’s version is in Leicester Square and provides free entertainment for Londoners and tourists alike, in the form of short sets from members of the cast of many of the popular west end musical shows. In 2009 this all happened last weekend and theatre breaks was there to capture some of the performances.

Wicked Theatre Breaks

Alexia Khadime is Elphaba in Wicked

Priscilla Queen of the Desert West End Live 2009 theatre breaks

Dirty dancing west end live 2009 theatrebreaks

We Will Rock You West End Live 2009 theatre breaks

Sister Act West End Live theatre breaks

Tags: Alexia Khadime, dirty dancing, Leicester Square, London, priscilla queen of the desert, Sister Act, theatre breaks, west end, Wicked

3rd Arrondissement Paris Breaks – Le Marais

The Marais district covers the 3rd and much of the 4th arrondissements. Le Marais  means literally “the swamp” and it’s now one of the best-loved right bank areas. There were many decades of decay, but now Le Marais has made a big comeback, though perhaps not quite like it was in the 17th-century when prosperous aristocrats inhabited the 3rd. It’s a great place to base Paris breaks now, being charmingly unique but also very central.

The Marais contains Paris’s major gay neighbourhoods,with lots of gay/lesbian restaurants, bars, and stores, as well as the remains of the old Jewish quarter, centered on rue des Rosiers. Two of the best attractions are museums. The Musée Picasso is a well curated collection of paintings, sculptures and ceramics which the French Government inherited in lieu of death duties. The Musée Carnavalet, a history museum also in the Marais depicts Parisian life from prehistoric times to the present. Small restaurants, kosher food and felafel kiosks abound for informal lunches.

Tags: Breaks, felafel, gay neighbourhoods, history museum, marais district, marais quarter, musée carnavalet, musée picasso, Paris, paris breaks, Picasso, rue des rosiers

Richmond is a stylish area of West London next to the river Thames and it the location of one of the best preserved old Odeon cinemas.

The Richmond Kinema opened on 21st April, Easter Monday,  1930. The first films shown that day were Gold Diggers of Broadway and The Cockney Spirit In War.

It was built for the Joseph Mears Theatres circuit. It had an original seating capacity of 1,533 in stalls and circle levels, making Richmond Kinema the largest Cinema yet built in teh West London area.  It was re-named Premier Cinema from 29th June 1940  this was to enable the removal of the Richmond name on the cinema, in case German parachutists landed nearby).

It was taken over by Oscar Deutsch’s Odeon Theatres Ltd. from 3rd January 1944 and was re-named Odeon in May 1944. Converted into a triple screen from 30th December 1972. Screen 1 in the old circle is beautiful. It retains the original Atmospheric style auditorium, modelled in the style of a 17th century Spanish courtyard.  Its owners confidently informed the public that their intention was to “make this Kinema equal to any in the West End,” The front of the auditorium was modelled on a fanciful recreation of a seventeenth century Spanish Grandee’s courtyard, features included ornate grillwork, Spanish tiles, Moorish windows and an intricate system of coloured lights was projected onto the ceiling to create an artificial sunrise and sunset in the intervals between films.

Features include ornate grillwork, Spanish tiles, Moorish windows, even stone and plaster oranges and doves. Screens 2 & 3 are located under the circle and both have seating provided for 118. The entrance foyer plasterwork depicts all the various trades of the people the original owner (Joseph T. Mears) employed, lots of them.

In 2008, the seating capacities are given as 406, 178 and 178.

The Richmond Odeon is a Grade II Listed building because it’s the most architecturally interesting of Richmond’s Cinemas. It is believed to have been the first “semi-atmospheric” cinema in Britain.

Tags: Joseph T. Mears, Listed, London, Odeon, odeon cinemas, Oscar Deutsch, Premier Cinema, Richmond, Thames, West London

Digital Cities 6: Concepts, Methods and Systems of Urban Informatics
Workshop at the 4th International Conference on Communities and Technologies
Penn State, USA, 24th June 2009

April 30th, 2009 Workshop position papers due
May 18th, 2009 Author notifications sent
June 24th, 2009 Workshop

http://cct2009.ist.psu.edu/workshops.cfm

Keynote speaker

We are happy to announce that Professor Carlo Ratti, Director of the SENSEable City Lab at MIT (senseable.mit.edu), will deliver the keynote presentation at Digital Cities 6.

The real-time city is now real! The increasing deployment of sensors and hand-held electronics in recent years is allowing a new approach to the study of the built environment. The way we describe and understand cities is being radically transformed – alongside the tools we use to design them and impact on their physical structure. Studying these changes from a critical point of view and anticipating them is the goal of the SENSEable City Laboratory, a new research initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

1 Theme

Transport grids, building complexes, information and communication technology, social networks and people form the bones, organs, muscles, nerves and cell tissue of a city. Studying the organisation and structure of these systems may seem straightforward at first, since there are visible artifacts and tangible objects that we can observe and examine. We can count the number of cars on the road, the number of apartments in a building, the number of emails on our computer screens and the number of profiles on social networking sites. We could also qualify these observations by recording the make and model of cars, the size and price of apartments, the sender and recipient of emails and the content and popularity of online profiles. This approach would potentially produce a large amount of data and render a detailed map of various levels of a city’s infrastructure, but a large quantity of detail does not necessarily result in a great quality (and clarity) of meaning. How do we analyse this data to better understand the ‘city’ as an organism? How do the cells of the city cluster to form tissue and organs, and how do various systems communicate and interact with each other? And, recognising that we ourselves are cells living in cities as active agents, how do we evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the processes we observe in order to plan, design and develop more livable cities?

A macroscopic perspective of urban anatomy does not easily reveal those meticulous details which are necessary to help us understand and appreciate what Anthony Townsend calls the urban metabolism (Townsend, 2000), that is, the nutrients, capacities, processes and pace which nurture the city to keep it alive. Some of the fascination with human anatomy stems from the fact that a living body is more than the sum of its parts. Similarly, the city is more than the sum of its physical elements. Trying to get to the bottom of a city’s existence, urban anatomists have to become dissectors of urban infrastructure by trying to microscopically uncover the connections and interrelationships of city elements. Yet, this is anything but trivial for at least three reasons. First, time is a crucial factor. Many events that trigger urban processes involving multiple systems result in a timely interrelated response. A dissection by isolating one system from another, would cut the communication link between them and jeopardise the study of the wider process. The city comprises many of these real-time systems and requires approaches and tools to conduct real-time examinations. Second, the physical city is increasingly complemented with a virtual layer that digitally augments and enhances urban infrastructures by means of information and communication technology including mobile and wireless networks. This world, which Mitchell (1995) called the ‘city of bits,’ is invisible to the human eye, and we require instruments for live surgery to render the invisible visible. Third and most importantly, the ‘cells’ of the urban body, the lifeblood of cities, are the city dwellers who have a life of their own and who introduce human fuzziness and socio-cultural variables to the study of the city. The toolbox of what could be termed anthropological urban anatomy thus calls for research approaches that can differentiate (and break apart) a universally applicable model of ‘The City’ by being sensitive to individual circumstances, local characteristics and socio-cultural contexts.
Exploring these three challenges, this workshop looks at concepts, research methods and instruments that become the microscope of urban anatomy. We want to discuss urban informatics systems that provide real-time tools for examining the real-time city, to picture the invisible and to zoom into a fine-grained resolution of urban environments that reveal the depth and contextual nuances of urban metabolism processes at work.

2 Topics

Relevant workshop topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Civic and community engagement strategies to support urban planning
• Public sphere, participation and online deliberation systems
• Urban e-government, e-governance, e-participation, e-democracy approaches
• u-City: Ubiquitous computing, pervasive technology, wireless internet and mobile applications
• Locative media, navigation and space
• Urban informatics design and development methods and epistemologies
• Multi-format user-generated content (narratives, photos, videos, multimedia)
• Neogeography and 3D virtual environments for urban design and planning
• Simulations to reproduce and analyse complex social phenomena and city systems
• Social networking, collective intelligence and crowd sourcing in the urban context
• Environmental, economic and social sustainability
• Citizen science
• Access, trust, privacy, safety and surveillance
• Implications for residential architecture and the design of cities and public spaces
• Ethical considerations scrutinizing the assumptions behind urban informatics

3 Organisation and Submission Details

This is a full day workshop. We will start off with a keynote address by an eminent speaker. Rather than formal conference-style paper presentations, we will follow the successful peer interview format and ask each participant to interview another contributing author. Pairs will be assigned in advance to prepare questions and engage with the paper. After lunch, there will be a range of group activities and a closing plenary discussion at the end. The workshop can accommodate a maximum number of between 25 to 30 participants including presenters in order to provide an environment that is conducive to debate and interaction.
We are interested in three types of contributions:

Concepts: Essay style papers discussing theoretical and conceptual ideas and innovation within a cross-disciplinary framework.

Methods: Papers reporting on novel approaches in the area of urban informatics, e.g. network action research, shared visual ethnography, urban probes, cross-disciplinary methods, etc.

Systems: Reports of systems and case studies that ground findings in practice and experience.

Prospective participants are asked to submit a position paper (2-4 pages total, in English, ACM SIGCHI 2-column format, same as for the C&T full papers) related to one of the workshop topics. Each submission should also include a short biography stating the author’s background and motivation for attending the workshop. Workshop position papers are due on April 30th, 2009 and will be reviewed and selected by the organisers with the support from an international program committee. Accepted authors will be notified by May 18th, 2009 – to leave enough time to qualify for the early bird conference registration. The acceptance of a workshop position paper implies that at least one of the authors will register for both the workshop and the Communities & Technologies 2009 conference. The workshop takes place on June 24th, 2009. After the workshop, selected contributors are invited to submit a full paper by October 1st, 2009. Full papers will undergo double blind peer review before being published. Arrangements for an edited book or a special issue of a relevant international journal are currently underway.

Template:

http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates

4 Bibliography

Each Digital Cities workshop has produced an edited volume containing selected workshop papers and other invited contributions as follows:

Digital Cities 5 — Foth, M. (Ed.) (2009). Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, IGI Global.

Digital Cities 4 — Aurigi, A., & De Cindio, F. (Eds.). (2008). Augmented Urban Spaces: Articulating the Physical and Electronic City. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.

Digital Cities 3 — van den Besselaar, P., & Koizumi, S. (Eds.). (2005). Digital Cities 3: Information Technologies for Social Capital (Lecture Notes in Computer Science No. 3081). Heidelberg, Germany: Springer.

Digital Cities 2 — Tanabe, M., van den Besselaar, P., & Ishida, T. (Eds.). (2002). Digital Cities 2: Computational and Sociological Approaches (Lecture Notes in Computer Science No. 2362). Heidelberg, Germany: Springer.

Digital Cities 1 — Ishida, T., & Isbister, K. (Eds.). (2000). Digital Cities: Technologies, Experiences, and Future Perspectives (Lecture Notes in Computer Science No. 1765). Heidelberg, Germany: Springer.

5 Organisers

Marcus Foth
Senior Research Fellow, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
m.foth@qut.edu.au

Laura Forlano
Kauffman Fellow in Law, Yale Law School, New Haven, USA
laura.forlano@yale.edu

Hiromitsu Hattori
Assistant Professor, Department of Social Informatics, Kyoto University, Japan
hatto@i.kyoto-u.ac.jp

Tags: Digital Cities