A round-up of city stories we enjoyed elsewhere this week.
- Slate is currently running a series on the seven wonders of the modern world, and this week, they’ve chosen mapping. We at CityMetric love maps, so were delighted to see the practice compared to the pyramids or the hanging gardens of Babylon. The piece’s author gives the following reasons for his nomination:
Today’s GPS apps and devices reach to the heavens to help us navigate our little corners of the Earth. We can know that traffic is seriously backed up on the southbound lanes of I-95 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, because a car is broken down on the side of the road…
These mostly free services are some of the most valuable—but difficult to value—components of the so-called “consumer surplus” that our modern information economy provides.
- This excellent interactive graphic from the FT (£) shows the relative speeds of eight skyscrapers’ elevators. Dull as it sounds, watching the tiny elevators reach the tops of these buildings is oddly hypnotic.
This screenshot shows the relative locations of the lifts as the fastest, in Guangzhou’s CTF Finance Centre, reaches its peak:
