I was invited to revisit an essay I wrote that examined two streets, one in a postmodern metropolis and another in a ghosttown, and a few things have come across my path that have made me think more about the curious intersection of human existence and human absence: James Griffieon’s Detroit, Justin Armstrong’s Midwestern Plains, and ‘Deviant Man’s’ Pripyat:
(Justin A. has sent along a nice set that includes pictures of Northampton’s old, recently torn down mental hospital: here.)
I saw this when it first became news, but you have to applaud Edith Macefield, who turned down $1,000,000 for her home. The picture on the left is her home, the picture on the right is the cover of Logan and Molotch’s Urban Fortunes.
E.g., Ugandan Public Phone Booth on a Bicycle, Williamsburg Hipster Solar Powered Power Charger Cart, Ugandan Charge Cart, Outdoor Barbers in India, Oaxaca Mobile Stores, London’s Hyde Park Speaker’s Corner, Kenyan Chalk Graffiti, Minnesotean Political Campaign Dolly, Chinese Street Retail, Joshua Callaghan’s infrastructure camouflage public art, Congolese Street Arcade, and (recent favorite) UK ‘Reverse Graffiti.’
…I often think of Borges’ Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. Manohla Dargis, in viewing Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, is reminded of Borges’ On Exactitude of Science. Here:
…In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.
From Travels of Praiseworthy Men ( 1658 ) by J. A. Suarez Miranda
Borges, J.L. 1999. Collected Fictions. Trans. A.H. Hurley. New York: Penguin.
Oh, the beginnings of the semester, and a hard drive meltdown (to the rescue: Time Capsule) have put a lull in ye ole blogging/posting. Very close to sending out some new work on the transformation of the urban public spaces, and found a translation of Bruno Latour’s Paris: Ville Invisible in both text (pdf), and in a flash/visual representation. Very exciting for me, since translating more than a few sections at a time was too prohibitive. It includes some of the best writing he’s done:
At a certain temperature Society no longer exists. It breaks down like bits of DNA that are heated slightly; it frays like them, becomes stringy. It is no longer a sphere next to other spheres, like grapefruits packed in a box, but a weird way of moving about, tracing figures, like unknown writing on rice paper painted with an invisible brush (p. 11)
Nathan Glazer pens a book on a topic I wish I wrote on, and Charles Taylor writes the response I wish I had written (ditto for Jonathan Lethem’s Slate piece, in which he calls it a ‘trojan horse’). Gehry’s monster project will shape beloved Brooklyn in a way that no other project has since the Navy Yard. Speaking of buildings, I had a great time a few weeks ago at MoMAs Home Delivery exhibit. It touched my fond architectural memories, and got me excited about teaching Urban Sociology later this week (only later in the semester will we be talking about temporary spaces and cultures).
One of the other great things about the ASA is the book exhibit, which allows for all sorts of new ideas to bounce around in your head. I picked up Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, and inhaled it in two days. It is a near-perfect book for urban sociology. It has everything: a deadly disease (cholera) a tale of scientific inquiry triumphing over myth (social research over the ‘miasma’ hypothesis), compelling protagonist (the premiere London anesthesiologist who uses ‘shoe-leather’ and sociological research to solve the riddle, and a young priest who uses his neighborhood-level knowledge for crucial assistance), and maps!
It is the story of the 1853 cholera outbreak. Deaths were assumed to have something to do with bad air (‘miasma’), and that theory led to questions over elevation, leading researchers to believe that inner-city dwellers at once were to blame for the miserable conditions they were in, but also to explain how elites who lived in places like Hampstead were spared. (The result of the 19th Century outbreak was about 1000 London souls–in proportion, greater than the deaths from 9/11.) In truth, the communities at higher elevations:
tended to be less densely settled than the crowded streets around the Thames, and their distance from the river made them less likely to drink its contaminated water. Higher elevations were safer, but not because they were free from miasma. They were safer because they had cleaner water. (p. 102)
There are all sorts of lessons for students within. Examples include: the Durkheimian specialization of roles in cities (and particularly around the problem of waste/’night-soil’) (p. 1-5), social prejudices of class and race affecting research (p. 133), local knowledge (inter alia, p. 146-7), the interviewer effect (p.155), urban planning gone askew (p. 120), how a bad theory can frame research questions (p. 165), city planning and infrastructure (inter alia, p 18), urban development as a mixture of collective action and individual choice (p. 91), urban traumas (p. 33), the power of local knowledge and autodidacts (p. 202 and 220), mistakes over correlation and causation (p. 101), the ramifications for global cities wherein over a billion squatters live today (p. 216), and the effects of powerful visual representations of social data (p. 193-97). It has given me a few more ideas to the festival project. (You can listen to the author talk about it here.)
In another retelling of London, Penguin Books is offering up a ‘We Tell Stories’ series, wherein authors are asked to tell a story using the first line of a classic, using new technology in some way. Charles Cummings wrote ‘The 21 Steps‘ (spinning off of James Buchan’s The 39 Steps), which is a fun romp. It is a detective story that uses Google Maps to help tell the tale. Here is the background of its creation.
And last, here is a link to ‘The Hand Drawn Map Association.’
Today’s E. B. (Elwin Brooks) White’s birthday. Like everyone else, I knew him from Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, but when I moved to New York, one of the first books that was given to me (by dear Mark Shulman) was his essay, Here Is New York. It absolutely floored me with its brisk beauty. It appeared first in Holiday magazine sixty years ago, and even though so many of the references (e.g., the Third Avenue elevated line, old speakeasies, the coal chutes into cellars) have faded away–along with the magazine that published it–his simple observations about urban life still hold true. He even has a premonition:
The city at last perfectly illustrates both the universal dilemma and the general solution, this riddle in steel and stone is at once the prefect target and the perfect demonstration of nonviolence…this lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway, home of all people and nations…housing the deliberations by which the planes are to be stayed and their errand forestalled.
Of course, he’s referring to the United Nations building that was rising from the skyline at the time. But it is quotes like these that get me tapping out about him first thing in the morning:
Many a New Yorker spends a lifetime within the confines of an area smaller than a country village. Let him walk two blocks from his corner and he is in a strange land.
There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born there, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size, its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something ….Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.
My newfound respect for him led me to Strunk and White’s Elements of Style which, along with Becker’s Writing for Social Scientists, is always on my desk. (E.B. was commissioned to update his old professor’s little book after he had passed away.)
![[walls.jpg]](http://bp3.blogger.com/_qXoW9B_AHE4/R2fDP3b769I/AAAAAAAAACY/5xyMK-qOCHk/s1600/walls.jpg)
Sequestered away in Northampton and now similarly confined on Long Island, yet writing about cities and William H. Whyte level serendipity, I’m getting a little cabin fever. When reading about these topics, however, I find this to share. Graeme Gilloch notes that Kracauer “contrasts the cityscape as deliberate construction and as unforeseeable improvisation” in his meditation on Berlin (2007: 121). Gilloch goes on to quote him at length:
One can distinguish between two types of cityscape: those which are consciously fashioned and those which come about unintentionally. The former spring from the artistic will as realized in those squares, vistas, building ensembles and perspectives which Baedecker generally sees fit to highlight with a star. In contrast, the latter come into being without prior plan. They are not, like the Pariser Platz or the Place de la Concorde, compositions owing their existence to some unifying building ethos. Rather, they are creations of chance and as such cannot be called to account. Such a cityscape, itself never the object of any particular interest, occurs wherever masses of stone and streets meet, the elements of which emerge from quite disparate interests. It is as unfashioned as Nature itself, and can be likened to a landscape in that it asserts itself unconsciously. Unconcerned about its visage, it bides its time.
In my online travels, I also came across one of my favorite New York writers, Luc Sante, who has a lovely online archive of a blog on visual information.
For three different GIS mapping sites, see Queens College’s Social Explorer, Brown’s MAPS USA, and SUNY Albany’s new MSA MAPS. For an anagram see this.
Update: Baltimore has a Festival of Maps! I want to go!
Update #2:
