This week’s news and views for urbanists:

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  Where is the Center of a City? By blowing Google’s red markers up to “life-size” and physically planting them in real places, German artist Aram Bartholl  brings attention to the blurring between real and virtual space. (Architizer)

• MIT’s Place Pulse: A “Hot Or Not” For Cities, To Fix Broken Blocks: A website uses crowdsourcing to convert people’s perceptions of streets into a quantitative benchmark for measuring fuzzy qualities like how safe, rich, and unique a city feels. (FastCo Design)

• A Vision of How People Should Live, From Desert Revelers to Urbanites: Rod Garrett, who laid out Burning Man, the annual festival of self-expression in Nevada, drew accolades for his approach. (New York Times)

• How garage & basement apartments help people, neighborhoods and the environment: One of the best ways to accommodate growth (as we must) without either exacerbating sprawl or disturbing the character of existing communities is by using so-called “accessory units.” (NDRC Switchboard)

• Pop-up placemaking and next gen urban neighborhoods: If there ever was a time to experiment with forward-thinking placemaking, the time is now. ‘Pop-up’ placemaking allows just that by enabling allow cities to try out innovative placemaking without much if any taxpayer commitment. (Cooltown Studios)

Hope you have a great long weekend!