Urba-dventure (0) : Diaries of a Spatial Empath

I love CITIES ! In all shapes and sizes, they are magical beings tending to our needs. But one thing that has always fascinated me is how their chain of reaction is open, and that there are many dimensions and complex layers to them that can go beyond human grasp and understanding or even imagination.

Cities, as Glaeser (2011) and Jacobs (1961) before him have argued, are about “connecting people.” Cataliseur de changement ! Their complexity is unparalleled, their scale too is one of the special traits about them : Spatially in and out of our grip, temporally sometimes fast to monitor or so slow to experiment... That restless and endless activity of cities ... 

Let's consider for a moment these creatures, thinking of cities as living organisms helps us see things differently and start asking : Do cities die ? How are they even born in the first place ?... And so many other "physiological", "morphological", "economic", "social", "legal" questions... Many questions arise and demand the precision of a surgeon to tackle.

But let's trade the sharp scalpel for one pair of eyes: the eyes of bewilderment !

First, let me tell you how happy I am that more than half of the world population is now urban, and there might be more common grounds to share with other humans who can relate to urbanity and the urban life as diverse as it is. I'm excited because cities are increasingly becoming the sites of most economic growth (Robert Sanchèz Rodriguez), hence are seen as lands on which dreams could come true. 

Jane Jacobs once said, “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody” (1961, p. 238).

It's about the flows that constitute the richness of such agglomerations that I want to tell these stories. Stories as told by: a young aspiring urbanite, an old fountain standing at the center of a historic district, a lady who reminisces about her former life in another city and is fascinated by how different yet similar urban life is, the metro artist who stands in the middle of a corridor full of passengers heedlessly walking by him, seagulls gathering around a lamp post at night, ... etc.

In my urban adventures series, I will be exploring and imagining cities through their lenses, as I add my own perception of the built environment in cities which is based on my academic training of reading their morphology, social practices, history and so on. As much as the precise academic stance is needed to approach cities, some imagination and fiction might help us draw nearer to these timeless creatures, because and I love this quote: 

“A city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time.”

—Patrick Geddes, Civics: as Applied Sociology (1905, p. 6)

In fact, when wandering around any urban place or space (we'll know the difference later), I become a spatial empath and listen carefully to the stories it tells me. Actually, let's not deal with cities as hardwares, or even software but rather as both, a sort of independent org-ware as Dr. Perlman once said. 

(c) Bobby - Dennis Matesic

Parallel to this new kind of exploration, I decided that it was time for me to start what I always loved to write about : Urban Adventures and to fully unveil my spatial-empathy. The joy I get from discovering a lost building, effaced from local memory and try to imagine the different possible scenarios it went through, or what it had witnessed, there's a tender feeling that engulfes me along with an element of mystery. The mystery that sometimes, I wouldn't have the full story and have to just accept the amnesiac building as it is. Although every urban space has a story of its own, it is not exclusively historical it is almost every time human.

During this metaphorical urban acupuncture, part of our job will not only be to focus on a spatial and rational vision,  but that of toying with our observations, and our imagination with a careful ear... to concrete. The same concrete walls that once sheltered our time in space, and are still standing. For I believe that it's one act of power to build walls and leave a trace. 

And just like a contemporary Herodotus : 

“I will tell the story as I go along of small cities no less than of great. Most of those that were great once are small today; and those that in my own lifetime have grown to greatness, were small enough in the old days.”

—Herodotus, The Histories.