I'm still writing on the talk that Bill King gave HPRA some weeks ago. Meanwhile, I stumbled across this amazing set of photos of London at night.
Commentary: Many of these photos are of central London. You can tell this by viewing the street scape, all of which are of buildings that were constructed many generations ago. The buildings are almost uniformly 4-7 stories tall. Compare those areas of London to the row housing in suburban Acton Town. Sam Staley wrote an email recently where he described Manhattan as a walking urban area. Inner London, built before the age of the Underground, is the same.
My company's London offices can roughly be located on the far right hand side of photograph #11. They are across the Thames from the London Eye, which was visible in a westerly direction from my company's cafeteria.
Finally, another item I look for when seeing a City from above is how much lighting of the city can you see from the sky? This is a rough proxy for the relative affluence of an urban area. I've traveled to many countries and have seen cities all over the world when flying over them at night. In poor areas of the world, you will notice that when you fly over their cities that there is very little light that is visible from the sky. In contrast, in the economically wealthy areas of the world, you can clearly see considerable lighting from the sky and these photos of London are a brilliant example of this phenomena.
Wizard
Posted by The Mighty Wizard at September 1, 2008 03:39 PM