there is a whole world out there
Pub chalkboards: funny, authentic, vulgar, cynical, attention-seeking, and more 😀
However they are, they are always of my interest, and the great city of Glasgow is a goldmine for them 🙂
I started to take their photos as every day I pass by a pub that writes quite funny ones.
Here is a collection of pub chalkboards from Glasgow. Let the battle of chalkboards begin and enjoy! (My favourite is the number 6)
I will update the list time to time 🙂
Tombili was one of the many street cats in Istanbul. A statue was erected to honour her and this is the story behind it.
Cities in Turkey are famous with cats roaming free. Although the cats live o streets, it is hard to call them strays or feral cats. They co-habit with people for centuries. They are part of urban culture in Turkey. Recently an award-winning documentary on the lives of cats in Istanbul was in cinemas, as you may have seen it already.
Individuals, and sometimes municipalities, take care of the needs of these beloved neighbours by feeding them and taking care of their health issues. For winter times, some individuals, NGOs and municipalities locate cat houses on streets to help them to survive in colder days.
Tombili was a beloved cat citizen of Istanbul and roamed on her street for almost 10 years. She became an internet celebrity when his famous pose is posted on the net. Tombili means chubby in Turkish and she is called as Tombili by her fellow humans for obvious reasons. A statue was erected on her favourite spot for her memory after her death.
People loved her so much. She became a mascot for the street with her laid back lifestyle. After her death, people started a petition to honour her and collected more than 17000 signature, which let them erect the statue in October 2016. I am not quite sure if it is the only street cat statue in the world, but it took attention from the media all over the world.
Unfortunately, not everyone values the friendship between Tombili and fellow humans. The statue was stolen in November in the same year, almost within a month after its opening. It sparked an outrage. Social media outlets were flooded with anger from people condemning the culprits.
Kadikoy municipality, the council which erected the statue, twitted “It is stolen” with a crying cat emoji:
The thieves could not be indifferent to this massive outcry, and returned the statue to its place within a week. The statue is now on Ziverbey Street, Kadikoy, where it belongs. Tombili is still in her neighbours’ lives with this statue.
The Tombili statue on Ziverbey Street (Image Credit: Tombili Facebook Page)
And this is the story of Tombili and her legacy.
Tombili (Image Credit: Anadolu Kedisi / Huffington Post)
Kor Dwarshuis visualised Airbnb boom in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin and New York since the foundation of Airbnb to 2017.
The maps show the striking increase in the numbers as well as the distribution and clustering of the Airbnb flats in these cities.
The maps also pose a question of the commodification of the couch as well as the scale of the unregulated holiday lets in these major cities.
It is also quite fun to explore 🙂 Click here to see more.
Helen Lock wrote for CityMetric on recent trend of co-living and its discontents.
Co-living buildings provide small apartments or rooms as well as communal spaces such as a library, restaurant, or co-working space. Freelancers or entrepreneurs can get work done, then sign off and mingle with people doing the same thing in the evening.
But my knowledge of housing is what I’ve learnt from my own expensive, mould-laden, experiences of renting, and I was initially quite taken with the idea. I am, after all, a target demographic for the model: freelance, young, jaded by private renting and unlikely to ever own my home.
Instead of worrying about those concerns, I could embrace being, “mobile” and “experience-led” along with lots of other people in the same situation that is, if I were to put all my trust in the developers I’ve spoken to. “People don’t care about ownership, nowadays,” I’ve been told several times by people, who, by nature of their very profession, own a lot of property. (CityMetric)
The article points out important issues regarding this trens such as its connections with precarious work and housing problems young, urban, professionals are facing.
While there are some positives in the model, such as the social aspect, it’s hard to shake the feeling that these options represent a sticking plaster fix to two converging problems: precarious work and not enough decent, spacious, affordable places to live.
Co-living spaces also benefit, in my opinion, from the current trend of seeing anything associated with words like “start-up” and “tech” as inherently exciting and good – and therefore not requiring much scrutiny. Housing experts say that building standards in such spaces are often lower than normal. (CityMetric)
It shows a different version of commodification of urban space by packaging various everyday experiences in these establishments as well as providing very limited living spaces with higher costs.
The article provides some insights about these issues, see the article for details here.
Urban Issues 