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The Art of Looking: What 11 Experts Teach Us about Seeing Our Familiar City Block with New Eyes

The Art of Looking: What 11 Experts Teach Us about Seeing Our Familiar City Block with New Eyes
by Maria Popova “Attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator. It asks what is relevant right now, and gears us up to notice only that.” “How we spend our days,” Annie Dillard wrote in her timelessly beautiful meditation on presence over productivity, “is, of course, how we spend our lives.” And nowhere do we fail at the art of presence most miserably and most tragically than in urban life — in the city, high on the cult of productivity, where we float past each other, past the buildings and trees and the little boy in the purple pants, past life itself, cut off from the breathing of the world by iPhone earbuds and solipsism. Horowitz begins by pointing our attention to the incompleteness of our experience of what we conveniently call “reality”: Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you. The book was her answer to the disconnect, an effort to “attend to that inattention.” The perceptions of infants are remarkable. Related:  Cities

MICHAEL WOLF PHOTOGRAPHY The Subway in Stockholm, Sweden Features Incredible Designs at Each Stop The subway in Stockholm, Sweden, is unlike any other metro system in the world. Although different subway systems throughout Europe tend to decoration their stops (like the Paris metro, for example), Stockholm’s metro system is seemingly dedicated to taking fantastical art deep beneath the city’s streets. The subway system has 100 stations, with each stop sporting a different design. Some show exposed rock, and others tile, but all of them have one thing in common: they are awesome. Many stations feature bright, eye-popping colors. It’s almost a shame to leave each stop. Others have statues carved into the rock walls. Almost every metro stop has a theme. And whether that theme is based in rock or tile, they are all incredible. If you’re ever stuck at a stop while using the Stockholm subway, don’t fear, because the vibrant station designs will soon give you a small case of Stockholm Syndrome. Source: visualnews.com

Radical Black Cities Occupy Wall Street has provided a dramatic reminder that cities still matter as spaces of participatory democracy and engaged citizenship. Yet while Occupy was criticized for being too white, in the United States, Blackness, once synonymous with the urban, now stands in for disappearance. The migrations from north to south, the exodus from city to suburb, and the renditions from the street to prison have all worked to undermine the idea of Black cities – and the very possibility of Black people living in cities. Gentrification and urban renewal, supported by the normalization of state-sanctioned terror against people of color through stop-and-frisk campaigns (not to mention the wholesale dragnet of the Muslim community), has acted to racially cleanse urban space. David Austin’s Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal (Between the Lines) provides a good place to start. The Public Archive <editor@thepublicarchive.com> Image: David Osagie, Occupy Nigeria (2011)

Manchester is the most linguistically diverse city in Europe | UK news | The Observer It boasts City and United, Corrie, world-renowned bands and famously inclement weather. And now Manchester has another claim to fame: the city is arguably the most ethnically diverse in Europe and, possibly, second only to New York in the world. Linguists at the University of Manchester have discovered that their city boasts a population that speaks at least 153 languages, making it one of the world's most diverse places linguistically. Research conducted by Professor Yaron Matras, of the University of Manchester's Multilingual Manchester project, suggests the true figure could be even higher. "Manchester's language diversity is higher than many countries," Matras said. With a population of half a million, Manchester is a fraction of the size of London, which has some 8 million inhabitants and also scores highly in terms of linguistic diversity. The city also attracts an increasingly large number of European citizens. But the increase has prompted concerns about assimilation.

Samba e Choro I think the cities we remember best are the ones that greet us with the utmost cruelty. I arrived in Rio after some months in Salvador de Bahia, fleeing a break-up: Europe was throwing itself into its sinister Christmas, and I thought that the summer sun of an unknown city might be a good way to dodge what was coming over me. It never stopped raining – not for a single moment – during the first week, and the city was empty. Horizontal deluges swept the desolate beach. On one of those nights, out of pure despair, I decided to go to a downtown nightclub. The taxi was leaving behind the majestic backdrop of Rio’s maritime facade. ‘My God,’ I thought, completely absorbed by my role as astronaut stranded on a hostile planet, ‘I’ll never get inside this implacable city. I don’t think I’ll ever forget my ride in that car whose destination I’d forgotten or which at least had stopped mattering to me. Of course, I ended up living there for two years. It’s no stranger to reinventing itself.

Handheld Time Machines The modern explorer has it all. Every gadget you can think of combined into a pocket-sized smartphone. There’s no need to be lost, or lonely, anywhere. I like that idea, though. From an office in the little town of Consett in the northeast, Mr. I am in Bristol, England’s sixth largest city. My plan is to roam with my maps and a smartphone, noticing as much as I can. 11:15 a.m. This is the center of Bristol. There are no bikes here. The weather is dry but overcast. In 1901, this was the point where two tram lines met, or perhaps diverged. In 1901, Broadmead was lined with narrow buildings extending away from it at right angles. Video captured by Real World ASCII for iOS. 11:21 a.m. I walk along Broadmead. 11:25 a.m. I am at the junction of Broadmead and Union Street. I cross Union Street and walk along Nelson Street. 11:28 a.m. There are two strollers. 11:30 a.m. There is an old police station building on my right. 11:33 a.m. Turn back on myself, returning to Nelson Street via All Saints’.

A tribute to female flâneurs: the women who reclaimed our city streets | Cities It’s never been more fashionable to write about walking in cities. Books on psychogeography have become a cottage industry, their authors held up as philosophers of modernity. The roots of what they do lie in a 19th-century phenomenon – the flâneur, a figure of privilege and leisure, with the time and money to amble around the city at will. He is both stimulated and agitated by the buzz and hum of the city, the crowd; he is both part of and separate from the urban spectacle, both actor and observer. He is also, always, a man. This, perhaps, explains why there is so little attention paid to writing by women about walking in cities: most people assume it doesn’t exist, or is the exception that proves the rule. Women have overlooked the possibilities for flâneuserie as well. The 19th-century Russian painter Marie Bashkirtseff saw an explicit link between walking in the city and the work that artists could create. We can even expand the definition of the flâneuse to include the reporter.

The heart of darkness that still beats within our 24-hour cities | Culture On some nights, in the insomniac intervals between rumbling goods trains, and beneath the sound of ambulance sirens, I can hear owls calling mournfully to one another from the trees that screen the railway tracks running past the back of the house in which I live in inner London. On most nights, alongside the shouts of people fighting or having sex, I hear cats and foxes screaming intermittently, as if they are being tortured. On some mornings, when a thin light first leaks through my blinds, I can hear a cockerel croaking from a garden in which chickens are kept a couple of streets away. Occasionally, when the mornings are resonantly still, the insistent tapping of a woodpecker chiselling at a tree trunk wakes me. The city at night is far eerier, far more feral than it is in the day. The night-time streams our cities’ pasts. In some quite literal sense, the city at night in the late 17th and 18th centuries was flamboyant. Not everyone was happy about this development.

Nightmare in Berlin by Hans Fallada review – a compelling portrait of postwar Germany | Books Hans Fallada’s career was chaotic and disastrous. Posterity is lucky to rescue anything from the long catastrophe. In ideal circumstances, he would have been the sort of novelist to address social issues in a popular, palatable style, enjoyed by a wide and serious-minded readership. As it happened, he had the bad luck to write in Germany, between the last years of the Weimar republic and the end of the second world war. The circumstances in which Fallada had to write and tried to publish badly affected his novels. These two novels, Fallada at his best, have a curious quality. There is a good biography in English by Jenny Williams. The Nightmare, retitled Nightmare in Berlin for marketing purposes, was written in 1946 and tells, with minimal adornment, the events that crashed over Fallada and his second wife, Ulla, also addicted to heroin. Not contained in this translation, however, which is careless to the point of the amateurish.

Bridges & Doors: The Will to Connection – Threshold By David Beer When it comes to the demarcation of social spaces and flows, Georg Simmel’s best known work is undoubtedly ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’. But there is much else that deals with questions concerning thresholds in his work. Simmel’s essay ‘Bridge and Door’ was originally written in 1909, an English translation was published in 1994 in Theory, Culture & Society (translated by Mark Ritter and introduced by David Frisby). In this case Simmel compares the roles played by the bridge and the door to explore their social presence. Simmel’s essay predominantly focuses upon social connectivity before using the door to think about how these connections are negotiated and managed. ‘The achievement reaches its zenith in the construction of a bridge. Simmel’s contention is that the bridge reveals a powerful drive to connect, and to mark both those connections and the ongoing possibility of connecting onto the landscape in material and permanent form. David Beer, University of York.

Exercises in Urban Reconnaissance

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