Walking in the city
In response to DeCerteau reading, I imagined the networks of the movements of the navigations of people as the different numerous routes I take to get to and from certain locations. When I take the train and need to get to the 600 South Michigan building, it’s a hurried pace, or frantic thread in the cloth of everyone’s movements. When I’m strolling up to Blick, it’s a calm leisurely stroll weaving between Wabash and Michigan being sure to follow my wandering mind of the other threads happening around me. A city can easily be compared to fabric because of its visual aspect of its interlocking grid and also how the different threads rely on each other to hold it together.
Map-ola.
Here is a visual example of a few various routes I take in the city. The red is my simple quick route from the south shore commuter train to the 600 building. The purple along LSD is how I get to the bars in boystown, the dark green is how I get to one of my sister’s apartments, the yellow/grey is how I get to the Chicago Bagel Authority from school (etc….)
This representation of the threads and how city dwellers exist in the arms of the city and make these beautiful connections unknowingly reminds me of Vivian Maier. She passed away with no recognition of her work until very recent. Her negatives were discovered and it was found that she silently pursued photography looking at examples and books from street photographers before her.
That awesome dog photo.
And the old lady one.
More of her work can be found here: http://vivianmaier.blogspot.com/
Lynch
I.The image and perception is a fantastic topic. I will drive/commute to Chicago and it is always so small. The willis/sears tower is physically tall and the city itself is spatially big but because I grew up near Chicago, the city is always going to be a perception of a “tiny” place. This past summer I visited New York and the city in my perception is amazing and massive. The buildings (even at six stories tall) were giants to me. This mental image is going stick with me unless I move there and get familiar with that city for about two years.
III.
The public image and perception of a city gets categorized into five elements- paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks.
All of these work in a harmony of some sort. We navigate by all of these unknowingly at times. In my traveling description from the exercise in class on Monday the 24th, I used all of these to describe how I navigate my way down to Savoy, IL.
