Creature of the Shade

left vs. north: imagining the city

I've been chatting with Dan Hill, author of the seriously urbanist blog City of Sound, about how people imagine and remember the city, town, or area where they live.

Many years ago, a female colleague and I were driving around a Bay Area city that we both knew very, very well.  We were looking for a particular restaurant that she remembered being good.  I asked her what street it was on.  She didn't remember that, but she remembered: "You turn left at the flagpole."

final catblogging friday

Evander (pic here) adopted me in Portland in 1998.  Only weeks later, he had the last ear-shredding fight that made his name, and once we'd patched him up he seemed content to retire.  I blogged about him here, with several pics, in 2005.

india: baffled, tender

I have procrastinated about putting some sort of period on this series of posts about India.  Even on tractable topics, I hate the pretense of summing up.  (Most of us, I expect, can think of novels and pieces of music that are wonderful except for the ending.)  When the subject is India, or even my petty adventures as a cosseted business traveler in India, summing up is obscene.

delhi: a spot of bush

My job takes me mostly to cities, but wherever I am, I want a sense of the natural landscape.  In Delhi without a car, that meant a quick hike on the Delhi ridge, an extension of the Aravalli range that defines the western edge of the city.

rickshaws in calcutta

A WorldHum piece by Michael Yessis links to a Calvin Trillin article about the proposed abolition of rickshaws in Kolkata (Calcutta), clearly referring to hand-drawn rickshaws as opposed to cycle- or auto-rickshaws.   Trillin quotes the mayor as saying that it's offensive to see “one man sweating and straining to pull another man.”

I had to add this comment:

india: sounds

Teresa asks:

Reading these posts on India I find myself wondering: what does it all
sound like? Out in the streets, at night, at noon, in the large stone
buildings, inside the police station, for example. The mad surge
forward you speak of must have attendant noise of some kind. And I find
myself entertaining various sounds in my mind.

all glory to the lord

While in Delhi I had occasion to visit two police stations.  (Don't ask, but I wasn't a suspect.)  Both were cavernous concrete buildings with almost no decoration inside or out, but every office contained at least one chipper poster on "Lane Discipline".  The message was something like "Stay in your lane!  It's safer!  It's fun!  And it's the law!"  I'm glad the police are getting this message, because I certainly didn't see such a poster anywhere else.  In fact, the sign above is the only hint I ever saw of traffic law enforcement.  (Question for India experts out there: Will the words "All Glory to the Lord" sound equally appealing to Hindus as to Muslims?)  The police seem, in general, to have a remarkably calm and realistic air about how much they can affect life in the city. 

Key principle of life in India: Nobody is in control.  Certainly not the police or anyone else in the government. India -- especially the new industrial India -- is a vast surging natural force.  The only way to seem in control of it is to run a little ahead of it in the direction it's already flowing.  The government does this on a good day, but even that is hard to do for long.

welcome, gordon price readers

If you've arrived via Gordon Price's link on his website Price Tags, welcome!  Let me show you around.

First of all, if you'd like a blog strictly on urbanism, then click on the category "Streets of Thought" at right.  This will largely protect you from all the other personal obsessions that I might otherwise lead you into, such as botany, travel, spirituality and creative writing.  We're in the midst of a series on India at the moment.

You might also enjoy some of my better older things.  The "City Essays" link over on the left takes you to essays from 2000-03 about individual cities.  (They currently reside in the somewhat tawdry environment of epinions.com, which treats all cities as products and also tends to forget how to format apostrophes and European characters over time; I will eventually find them a new home.)   A collection of my 1990s work on travel and placehood, including several early pieces on California and Australia, is here, in an old site that I can no longer edit.  Don't use the email pointer there; use the one here instead.

Hope you enjoy.  Do tell me what you think.

on jan gehl's plan for sydney

My old friend Gordon Price, the former Vancouver City Councilman who now writes and teaches on urban planning issues, posted some quick comments of mine on the Jan Gehl plan for the Sydney CBD.  I'll try to post more on this as soon as I get India out of my system.

the flaneur in delhi

When I arrive in a city that's new to me, my first desire is to take a day-long, mapless walk.  I start wherever I am, pick a general direction that leads me more or less toward the center of things, but then let my route can be guided my hundreds of tiny impulses about which seems more interesting, this way or that.    In short, I try to be a flaneur -- "a deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency" in Cornelia Otis Skinner's definition. (I wrote here, a while back, about being a flaneur in Sydney.)