FaceApp and similar reality-warping applications are especially fun to use in ways their designers never intended. Along similar lines, Google’s DeepDream (designed for photo manipulation) creates fascinating results using photographs but is even more stunning when applied to representations of cityscapes.

While training DeepDream (a neural network that adapts like a brain to new inputs) to identify, differentiate and understand images, Google researchers discovered it could “over-interpret” results as well. In short: it could start to “read into” images from previous experience, resulting in an array of beautiful (if disturbing) hybrids.

Once it went public, mapmakers were among those intrigued by the possibilities of geo-visualization, turning flat maps into seemingly living landscapes. Tim Waters, a geospatial developer, began taking OpenStreetMap data and running it through the system, generating these strangely psychedelic urban environments.

He discovered that a short run could create fractal and quilting effects, while longer and reiterated processing started to introduce faces and creatures to the mix.

Above: monkeys and frogs seem to emerge from the grid, while a coastal region forms the head of a bear, making the landscape look like a giant bearskin rug. Overall, the effects are quite beautiful, creating a sense of depth and adding character to what would otherwise be fairly generic representations.

We tend to think of the internet as something akin to aether, present all around us in the void – or perhaps something traveling down a series of tubes – the reality is much more complex, rich and intriguing.

In an upcoming book titled Networks of New York: An Internet Infrastructure Field Guide, Ingrid Burrington presents an urban variation on a naturalist’s handbook, giving you the tools to tour the real-life objects that are often obscured or simply hidden in plain sight all around cities.

From the author, “New York’s network infrastructure is a lot like the city itself: messy, sprawling, and at times near-incomprehensible. However, the city’s tendency toward flux is a strange blessing for the infrastructure sightseer: markings and remnants of the network are almost everywhere, once you know how to look for them.”

The story starts with manhole covers and progresses through street markings, which follow a federal color-coding standard: “Orange refers to the broad catch-all of ‘Communications, alarm, signal lines, cables and conduit.’ This means that orange lines can be internet cables, television cables, telephone lines, or other kinds of conduits.”

“The markings are sometimes really sloppy, and often in fragments. Sometimes you’ll see several different labels in the same place. A lot of these cables are bundled up together running through ducts under the city.” Suddenly all of the strange acronyms are comprehensible, including but not limited to: CATV, NXTG, T, ECS, RCN, MCI, L3, XO and FO.

The book also branches out to cover different kinds of antennas security cameras we are so used to seeing but many of which we do not understand the purpose of at a glance, from subway wifi devices and distributed antenna systems to CrimeEye, MTA and NYPD surveillance camers.

Finally, the authors builds up to the biggest elements of the built environment: architectural structures housing various large-scale elements of internet infrastructure along the city. Some of these are well-known, but the book brings to light a series of buildings less frequently visited, and provides tips on how to identify others.

Recognizing “these buildings when looking on the street is not always easy, but one telltale sign is to look for signs of ventilation and cooling systems. Alternatively, look for windows, or more accurately, the absence of them. (Note: on much larger buildings, in particular skyscrapers, vents also could just be a sign of a mechanical floor, the centralized space dedicated to maintaining utility needs for the entire building).”

If you happened to notice a USB stick poking out of a brick wall in an urban space, would you be brave enough to connect your computer to it just to see what it might contain? Will it dump a bunch of malicious software onto your machine, or reveal something amazing? You just never know. The Dead Drops offline peer-to-peer file sharing project has been called “the nerd equivalent to glory holes,” bringing the sense of anonymity provided by the internet into the real world in a way that feels conspicuously sketchy.

Berlin-based artist Aram Bartholl took inspiration from the methods spies used to transfer information in a secret location. The process of accessing or distributing files on these networks is anonymous, you can share anything you want, and actually plugging your laptop or tablet into the drive sometimes requires bending at awkward angles or doing something that looks vaguely suspicious.

Bartholl notes that the ‘danger’ of participating in the project is no different from that of sharing files on the internet – the veracity of that claim has not been verified, however. People typically share photographs, art, poetry and videos. The drives range from 64 megabytes to a whopping 120 gigabytes. To install one of your own, just find or create a hole in a wall or other urban surface, remove the thumb drive’s plastic case and wrap the memory board with waterproof tape, place it in the hole with just the port exposed and cement it in with fast-setting concrete.

The project started in 2010 and has since grown to thousands of locations worldwide, according to a database that tracks where they’ve been installed. Some can be found in the busiest areas of cities like New York, while others are in abandoned buildings off the beaten track. You can find out whether there are any near you, or create one of your own using the Dead Drops site’s instructions. To be safe, consider using a secondary or otherwise spare laptop for such adventures.

Catering to some of the 170,000 cyclists that ride across London every day, this segregated bicycle lane will stretch from west to east, pass through the heart of the city and span 18 miles when completed, the longest of its kind on the continent. Backed by mayor Boris Johnson, a second route will also eventually span perpendicular to this first one, reaching south to north and crossing the first path in the middle of the city.

Allocating bikers lane space on par with that given to vehicles and separated by safety curbs, this plan represents a huge shift in how London treats cyclists and the largest such endeavor of its kind to date. Few long bike paths on the planet can boast such separation for bikers from city traffic, a move that makes bike lanes much more accessible to bikers of all ages and abilities and portends a far different future for cities currently congested with cars.

As The Guardian‘s Peter Walker describes, “The effect is humanizing, civilizing, relaxing, enchanting. It makes the city immediately more appealing. Beyond all that it also rebuts the perennial complaint that the push for London bike routes is the niche hobby horse of a small coterie of middle-class, male cyclists. The whole point is that if you create safer cycling you necessarily create more inclusive cycling.”

Building on a series original-but-modified proposals shown directly above and below, the new path with pass along the Victoria Embankment to connect Tower Hill and Paddington, re-purposing existing lanes used by motorists and linking up with a north-south route that would connect King’s Cross with Elephant and Castle.

While the removal of motorized vehicular space has drawn complaints from some, it fits London’s larger vision of reducing car traffic in and through the city (dovetailing with existing strategies including a hefty congestion tax).

Other cities will be looking to the results of this radical change, which could have significant global influence on urban design strategies around city cycling for years and decades to come. Perhaps it is too much to hope for as a realized project (due to potentially prohibitive construction costs), but lofty visions like the London SkyCycle also remain ideas worth striving toward with regards to the future of bike transit, both within and beyond England’s capital.

A combination of contemporary regionalism and sustainable urbanism, this design strategy proposed by an Italian architecture firm involves a series of modules for living, working and interacting at different scales. Notably different from most models of urban design is the intentional lack of density, raising the question: is the premise that good urban strategies revolve around dense centers a universally valid one?

Connected by lines that serve as both dividers and connectors, the smallest modules are family-sized units, the mid-sized variants working as cultural, research and service centers and the largest operating as micro-cities with more complex communities.

By spreading these out, maximum use can be made of minimal rainfall (water capture) as well as sun exposure (solar power), rendering each unit relatively or entirely self-sufficient. Internally, composing, recycling and other sustainable strategies would be employed as well.

Luca Curci Architects describes the approach as follows: “The project-plane is made by a series of identity-places with symbiotic interconnections among them which create an organic and articulated system. The identity-places can be divided in 3 macro architectural types, different for dimension, function and inhabitants. Each identity-place is developed following residential and architectural solutions which respect the environment’s tradition, climatic condition and resources.”