Week One, urban spatiality.

I’ll start by saying that reading about people who think about the city more deeply and expansively than I do (which isn’t hard), is rather interesting.

I mentioned on the first day of class, the first question, that I describe cities (Chicago, specifically) as being metamorphical. I found this idea being repeated back to me in both of the readings from de Certeau and Lynch.

Cities, though made of concrete, brick,  steel and glass, are very amorphous. The structure, from an aerial view, is undulating, but static. But from below, a city is constantly changing. People change, places change. Interacting with the city on a personal level only goes so far. For the most part, the image of the city is very anonymous. Thinking of this reminds me of the scene in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, where Holly crawls into her new friend Paul’s apartment through the fire escape window (like she belonged there), and Paul quickly mentions that he was told you never get to know your neighbors in New York. It’s rare to know everyone on your block (like those residing in the suburbs). Everyone has their own routine, with some common meeting places.

Cities remind me of basic cell structure:

In an animal cell, each structure inside has a specific purpose, but they all work together (blindly) to function as a whole. They are all bound in by the cell wall, live in the cytoplasm (basic matrix structure- think the Grid), centrioles align at right angles to each other, the endoplasmic reticulum is fused to the membrane and serves as the cell’s transport system, the mitochondria and golgi body make the cell’s energy, and the vacuoles (of various sizes) are like houses or storage units. The nucleus, like the Chicago Loop in a way is central and contains lots of vital information. Fancy that!

I also find it interesting to think of the process of creating a relationship with the city as “a two way process between the observer and the observed”. There is something already created simply by the space existing, but we create something out of that solely for our own memory. This reminds me of Jon Gitelson’s project for the Armitage Brown line stop where he asked people he met to describe a memory of a place- and then he photographed it. Ordinarily, those places wouldn’t mean anything to anyone else (other than the fact that they read about it), but it means something else to someone else, but is still in public view.

de Certeau and Lynch both write about the idea of how the image of a city is formed and how successful that image is. I see this in relation to the suburbs, where most things are flat, all buildings capping at a certain elevation.
Suburbian Landscape:

Aerial Chicago landscape. Note the undulation of it’s structure and how distinguishing elements are much easier to navigate.

The view from my bedroom window, facing east towards the skyline. Just in the two mile view from here to the lakeshore I see many different things.

It’s like the difference between A SENTENCE IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, and a sentence with much more contrast in form through lowercase letters. The latter is much more approachable and easy to read. I attribute the contrast in form and the changing nature of the city to the lure it has over people.

Bon weekend!