[caption id="attachment_2419" align="aligncenter" width="558" caption="Photo: used by permission under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 License from Chris(UK)"][/caption] [Editor's Note: Former Vancouver reporter Christine McLaren is traveling around the world as the resident blogger for the BMW Guggenheim Lab, a mobile think tank investigating solutions to urban problems. In October the project wrapped up its three-month run in New York City -- which featured programming by Vancouver author Charles Montgomery -- and will travel next to Berlin, and on to Mumbai. This story originally appeared on the Lab's blog, the Lab|log.] Few in this day and age would contest the value of any land being set aside for the creation of public green space, and I am certainly not one of them. But when it comes to the benefits we derive from park space in a city, it is worth considering if bigger is necessarily better. Earlier this month the State of Illinois, the City of Chicago, and various other agencies made an announcement that caught the eye of many a public space advocate: the construction of the largest urban park in the continental United States.

  [Editor's Note: Former Vancouver reporter Christine McLaren is traveling around the world as the resident blogger for the BMW Guggenheim Lab, a mobile think tank investigating solutions to urban problems. In October the project wrapped up its three-month run in New York City -- which featured programming by Vancouver author Charles Montgomery -- and will travel next to Berlin, and on to Mumbai. This story originally appeared on the Lab's blog, the Lab|log.] We see them every day, popping up on our Twitter feeds, filtered through blogs, or even scattered throughout the New York Times: maps portraying not the usual locations or destinations, but data. From people’s kisses in Toronto, to the concentration of pizza joints in New York, to the number of women who ride bikes, to the likelihood of being killed by a car in any given American city, the list of lenses through which we can now view our cities and neighborhoods goes on, thanks to data-mapping geeks. “The map user has now become the map creator,” is how Fraser Taylor put it to me in an interview. The director of the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre at Carleton University, Taylor is one of the world’s leading cartographers, standing as the director of the International Steering Committee for Global Mapping and a member of the United Nations Expert Group on Global Geographic Information Management as well as a host of other major international mapping organizations. He describes what’s going on as an enormous cultural shift from a previous era when the mapping of our cities (or countries, or world, for that matter) was placed mainly in the hands of government mapping authorities. But even more importantly, Taylor says, we are also mapping new things—intangibles like social phenomena, feelings, impacts, and more. “Individuals inside cities and elsewhere are creating maps for themselves and in fact giving us their own narrative of what a cityscape is about. They are telling us what is important to them, and they’re mapping the kinds of things that previously would not be mapped,” he says. “It’s becoming part of the creation of a culture of a city.”

[Editor's Note: Former Vancouver reporter Christine McLaren is travelling around the world as the resident blogger for the BMW Guggenheim Lab, a mobile think tank investigating solutions to urban problems. This week the project wraps up its three-month run in New York City -- which featured programming by Vancouver author Charles Montgomery -- and will travel next to Berlin, and on to Mumbai. This story originally appeared on the Lab's blog, the Lab|log.] Last week I posted the story of my dream urban pilgrimage—a journey I recently made to the first post–World War II American sprawl suburb, Levittown. I wrote that I was caught off guard by how benevolent the residential sections of Levittown seemed when compared with the modern sprawling suburban neighborhoods that were modeled after it. It cannot be ignored, however, that the commercial strips within and surrounding Levittown nonetheless suffer from the same problem that sprawling suburban outposts do—the hollow lifelessness of a car-oriented landscape.

A Pilgrimage to Levittown, NY (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Burbs) from ResilientPLANET on Vimeo. [Editor's Note: Former Vancouver reporter Christine McLaren is traveling around the world as the resident blogger for the BMW Guggenheim Lab, a mobile think tank investigating solutions to urban problems. This week the project wraps up its three-month run in New York City -- which featured programming by Vancouver author Charles Montgomery -- and will travel next to Berlin, and on to Mumbai. This story originally appeared on the Lab's blog, the Lab|log.] Almost everyone has a secret pilgrimage destination tucked somewhere in their own personal book of dreams. For many these are, as Ryszard Kapuscinski once wrote, "certain magical names with seductive, colorful associations --Timbuktu, Lalibela, Casablanca." They are places to which we attach wonder, mystique, and fascination; places that we dream of one day exploring, with the subliminal hope of finding an exotic understanding of ourselves, the world, and our place within it. My secret place is Levittown. I have always wanted to go to Levittown.