SLAB Magazine

Mr Udo Arndt of the precicely titled “Verkehrslenkung Berlin (VLB) zentrale Straßenverkehrsbehörde Baustellenkoordination”, was kind enough to reply to my enquiry about the three green men of Torstraße. He explains:
“The changes to the crossing at Torstraße / Schönhauser Allee mean that a left turn from Torstraße into Schönhauser Alle is now possible. A left turn [...]

Three green men on Torstraße. What does this mean for the pedestrian? It means the dignity of crossing two lanes of traffic, two tram lines, and two more lanes of traffic in one go. That’s the trick! In one go! It doesn’t mean getting to the middle, having the light go red on you, and [...]

I’ve just returned from a private trip to Lille in France, where a few things inspired my appetite for all things geo-urban.
For starters, the name of the city is the story of its past. Lille is a contraction of “le île”, which is French for “island”. Lille used to be a merchant canal city, and [...]

Flying back from England last Wednesday with a copy of the Guardian newspaper, I was shocked to read that a piece of the Berlin Wall had been nicked over the Easter Weekend.
Coverage from
– The Guardian
– The BBC
– Der Spiegel [English]
– Deutsche Welle [English]

Ten years ago, when I first arrived in Berlin, one of the most conspicuous features of the city was the airborn maze of pink and blue pipes raised above the streets on metal stilts. It’s a typical method of routing mains water around, from and to building sites.

With the market hall on Zossener Straße in [...]

Understood by dogs: red tape = no shitting

Bedpost construction
See also:
Grass-Root-Gardens Pt.1
’Greys’ Invade Garden

The district of Tempelhof-Schöneberg has an interesting policy concerning the translation of park signage:

We are talking to you
Is the assumption that Turks, Serbo-Croats and Greeks are less likely to observe a ban worded in German than in their mother tongues? And what does this say about the presumed language-free internationalism of graphic icons?

Curious
SLAB welcomes readers from Japan, who have arrived here via this posting on Japanese car website Carview. It looks a bit like a Toyota Auris fan-site. I ran the posting’s headline through Google’s Japanese translation tool, and this came out:
The german o lith poster you are lazy, “infectious disease of the city! Escape to the [...]