Thursday, 3 September 2009

City Life

As Pete Heskett said in the fantastic Advice to the Next-Generation Planner:

“The planner of the future will need to be more Global not just in experience but in outlook and orientation…. We will travel more, we’ll consume more culture from outside of our home countries, and we’ll all become less ‘national’ and more ‘cosmopolitan’. Planners will need to make sure their ideas are more cosmopolitan and will need to focus not just on the difference of brands but how they can connect to the similarities in people across cultures.”

I use the internet an awful lot to pick up culture from outside the UK from sites such as Le Cool, PSFK, Spring Wise and Cool Hunting to name a few. I recently came across a new site called City One Minutes that gives you a peak into life in more than 100 cities around the world via one-minute videos.
Each city is divided into 24 one minute videos representing each hour of the day. You can search by city, time of day and month in which the video was shot.
Well worth having a browse through some of the videos for cultural and behavioural differences and similarites between various cities.

2 comments:

Mansi said...

Great find, Tom! Its a brilliant site! Amazing way of storytelling. Do you know who made it?

And I couldn't agree more on planners being more global and being able to bring more perspective to work.

Tom Gibson said...

Thanks for your comment Mansi. From what I can gather from their website the project is a collaboration between The One Minutes Foundation and Holland Doc 24, part of the Dutch Public Broadcast Organization NPO. The One Minutes Foundation seems to be a bigger project that applies the same one minute video format to other situations.
http://www.theoneminutes.org/
Hope that helps!