New Patterns
Reading the social spaces of a city has been high on my mind lately. The last few weeks have yielded gorgeous weather, and I have been venturing through the neighborhoods more often than usual.
When we look at maps and think about places, we are often used to seeing the same patterns – age, income, neighborhood. Rebecca Solnit applies an imaginative view towards San Francisco in Infinite City with the leading question “What makes a place?” By interweaving whimsy with history, attentively curated set of authors provide a series of vantage points for seeing the city. A history of immigration in the city is told by a captive narrative and a map about Shipyard and Sounds. Then there is the seminal map of the City’s Coffee Economies and Ecologies – a contemporary snapshot of seminal coffee outposts in San Francisco circa 2010. But my favorite journey is the one through “Phrenological San Francisco”, where Solnit “reads” to us the attributes to each of the city’s 14 major neighborhoods.
I also just came across a conversation that UrbanOmnibus had with author Suketu Mehta amidst the streets of Jackson Heights, Queens. Mehta draws our attention to the all-but-apparent Invisible City in front of us via unreported incomes and resulting informal (alternative?) economies. Neither Solnit or Mehta are designers or policymakers. But both provide provocation and sensitivity to the way in which circumstance shapes stories and, in turn, history shapes everyday life.
Related readings:
- (classic) A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, et. al.
- (recent academic paper) On the Delhi Metro: An Ethnographic View by Rashmi Sadana