from the vexed sexuality her position implies, and from her struggle to escape the status of spectacle and become spectator.
spectacle vs spectator. In public, woman are constantly the spectacle of the male gaze based on how they look, walk, etc. It is hard for women to escape that gaze in order to become a spectator of the city and it is also hard to balance both in the city.
Traditionally, a woman walking the streets is a ‘street walker’ – ‘all body’ – part and symbol of the spectacle and decadence of urban culture. Women have historically been represented as an “interruption in the city, a symptom of disorder, and a problem”
this is, unfortunately, very true. interesting choice of words. in this misogynistic society, woman are typically objectified, especially in the street. Also interesting how the term "street walker" can be used to describe prostitutes.
People’s gender, class and racial background, and to what degree their bodies conform to conventions of desire, or movement and anatomy, for example, affect their ability to extricate themselves from the spectacle of the city enough to be its observer
this point is interesting. we haven't really thought about the characteristics people have that may play into how they see, feel, and write the city.
a productive, yet relatively unconscious, speaking/writing of the city.
interesting that walking can help one experience the city considering that we've read many essays that discuss how one experienced the city . Perhaps writing can help people see and reflect upon what they normally can't
The first assumes a one-way causal relation: cities are physical entities designed by the minds of people and built by the body. A body is thus a physical tool used in the service of the mind, a disembodied consciousness, to make a physical city. Another common version of this dominant way of seeing bodies and cities is that the city is ‘bad’ for the body, ‘unnatural’ and damaging; this is still, however, very much a one-way relation.
very interesting how the two narratives are so true yet contradict each other. Bodies build cities, yet cities hurt bodies. It is interesting to look at the city from the perspective that it is a completely manmade and unnatural concept. In what ways is the synthenticness of a city damaging?
The city is subject to transformation and reinscription by the changing demographic, economic, and psychological needs of the body. Bodies “reinscribe and project themselves onto their sociocultural environment so that the environment both produces and reflects the form and interests of the body”
Is the city then a site upon which the aforementioned inequalities can be overturned?
As a form of enunciation, walking has its own rhetoric. The trajectories, shortcuts, and detours taken by passers-by are turns of phrase and stylistic figures.
interesting to think of a pedestrian as an artist. if there is one destination that many different people have to get to, the way in which they get there will likely be different. these differences are what allow the pedestrian to be an artist
cross-dressing for women at certain times and places;
women having to distance themselves from traditional expressions of femininity in order to experience the city properly.
hus, cities become meaningful and habitable through the legends, memories, and dreams that accumulate in and haunt places
cities are meaningful because of our interactions and experiences within them. Also, the idea of dreams, memories, etc. haunting us is a good connection with Didion and how she can't smell Henri Bendel soap without thinking of NY
Traditionally, a woman walking the streets is a ‘street walker’ – ‘all body’ – part and symbol of the spectacle and decadence of urban culture. Women have historically been represented as an “interruption in the city, a symptom of disorder, and a problem”
Women are seen as objects of the city, not urban bodies as other inhabitants are seen, and their experience is erased in terms of space and place in urban environments.
the flâneur is traditionally a middle-class, masculine subject of leisure whose privileged position shields him from the curiosity of the crowd
The privilege of patriarchy embedded even in the context of space and place
As practitioners and observers, flâneur and detectives are always working at street level, with partial knowledge. They never operate solely from an imaginary position of an all-seeing, penetrative eye hovering ‘above’ the city. They are always also urban bodies.
So is it useless for city planners to not be from the city or spend significant time in the city? Is it essential to be this urban body to create a successful city?
They are returned from a relatively invisible, dis-embodied position of anonymous observer to their place as a body in the crowd, becoming spectacle for others, an everyday ‘common man’, one of the ‘masses’ once more.
I found this statement very interesting, sort of "Inception"- like, that we are observers but are also being observed by other observers inhabiting the city, creating a perpetuous cycle of observing.
The pedestrian subject reads/writes the city as an everyday user of place, producing space – writing the actual city – in the process.
How much of a city is produced by the people who inhabit it? How much by the city planners? Who has control?
The city is subject to transformation and reinscription by the changing demographic, economic, and psychological needs of the body. Bodies “reinscribe and project themselves onto their sociocultural environment so that the environment both produces and reflects the form and interests of the body”
Interactive relationship between the body and the transforming city around it.
Tactical ways of operating appropriate and divert spaces away from administrative strategies designed to create abstract place
People naturally operating in the city is what makes the city unique. This is what makes something bottom up rather than top down.
It affects the way the subject sees others...as well as the subject’s understanding of, alignment with, and positioning in space...moreover, the city is, of course, also the site for the body’s cultural saturation, its takeover and transformation by images, representational systems, the mass media, and the arts – the place where the body is representationally reexplored, transformed, contested, reinscribed.
The city is a place where "body" is in the public eye and open for people to make comments that we saw in the video.
Pedestrians, in effect, tell urban stories through their movements. A multitude of intertwined paths and detours weave the urban fabric. They give their shape to spaces and weave together places in ways that potentially transgress, from within, the abstract map imposed from above by the panoptic gaze and administrative strategies of corporate and government interests
Relates to our discussion surrounding Unfathomable Cities. Are locations and neighborhoods shaped by their inhabitants or are the inhabitants shaped by the place?
space organised by the spatial order
Does space when organized by order become place? Does the creation of order fill the negative space?
“produce each other as forms of the hyperreal, as modes of simulation which have overtaken and transformed whatever reality each may have into the image of the other
I like this because it clearly creates an image of how people create cities but also that cities create people. It's a mutually binding thing
they also produce a pattern of automatic links and inequalities of power between otherwise unrelated bodies.
That's true, but honestly, where aren't you going to find a boundary of power, regardless of where you go?
The gendered pedestrian subject’s point-of-view is drawn ‘down’ to the level of the street by the difference her gendered body makes socio-culturally.
the woman's perspective is drawn 'down', shows the demeaning of women on the streets
Any particular trajectory or detour composes an unforeseeable path, a “long poem of walking”, out of the formal spatial possibilities at its disposal
particular makes it personal- one's own path
The point-of-view of the female reader/writer of the city is thus split between that of a privileged observer (in terms of class and culture, for example) and that of the object and symbol of the degeneration and contamination of urban life as it has been conventionally written.
This is just deep. Deep stuff right here. Women are so frequently harassed simply because of their gender, cheating them out of simply being able to observe a city.
People’s gender, class and racial background, and to what degree their bodies conform to conventions of desire, or movement and anatomy, for example, affect their ability to extricate themselves from the spectacle of the city enough to be its observer.
this is a really interesting perspective that I've never really thought about before. The author is suggesting that some people aren't gifted with anonymity in cities, because of their characteristics, which is actually scarily true and unfortunate, now that I think about it.
a productive, yet relatively unconscious, speaking/writing of the city.
Interesting that walking can be both productive and unconscious simultaneously
the opacity of the body in movement, gesticulating, walking, taking its pleasure, is what indefinitely organises a here in relation to an abroad, a ‘familiarity’ in relation to a ‘foreignness’”
This is an interesting quote to use, because it kinda reflects Unfathomable City in the sense that it isn't maps that define places, but rather the memories and actions people take in those places that define them.
Place enables an institution to delineate itself and its others and to exercise strategies of power using this distinction
In this sense, the place is always more distinguishable than a place, because it serves more of a purpose to the people who associate with it.
Walking is framed as an elementary and embodied form of experiencing urban space – a productive, yet relatively unconscious, speaking/writing of the city.
This is a cool summarization of the ideas presented in the writing. Walking through a city is the best way, but also the worst way, to experience a city. It's interesting how it can kind of turn both ways, because on one hand, the walking embodies what the experience of the city, but it can also make you unaware of what is actually surrounding you.
from the vexed sexuality her position implies, and from her struggle to escape the status of spectacle and become spectator.
This still exists today. Women feel like they must dress a certain way, slightly guyish, so that they won't imply their sexuality. She can be a spectator, but mainly for herself, in order to prevent being a spectacle for men.
He is the subject, rather than the object, of the ‘botanizing’ gaze by virtue of his privileged position as spectator not spectacle.
the idea that being a privileged, middle-class, white male allows one to ignore the existence of others and their struggles/adversities. Connects to “10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman”-----women in cities do not have the privilege of being a spectator because multiple men view them as a spectacle, an object, something they can use their privilege/power to manipulate
inequalities of power between otherwise unrelated bodies
Boundaries represent division or assertion of power. Can be connected to the levees and prisons map in Unfathomable City.
anonymous
Recalls our conversation about anonymity in the city; challenges this idea by saying that not all are anonymous.
Maps, on the other hand, function strategically to colonise space, rendering geographical knowledge as an abstract, ahistorical place that erases the spatial practices that are the condition of its possibility.
This combines the ideas we've discussed with mapping and the ideas about space vs. place. She says that place is made through mapping, by taking the space and defining it.
thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers.
I think that Collie uses "space" the way that we have been defining "place" in our conversations about the differences between the two words.
writing of the city.
This is an interesting idea, that walking can be like writing the city. Kind of like how you have to know a space to map it.
re-use culture and “reappropriate the space organised by techniques of sociocultural production”
Reminds me of Whyte's ideas about the ways in which the interaction between the city and the people changes. How people use the city spaces and how they don't, and how urban planning must acknowledge and respond to that.
es are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pa.sts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unf led but lik7 stones eld in reserve, remaining in an enigmatic state, symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure of the body. "I feel good here":50 the well-being under-expressed in the language it appears in like a fleeting glimmer is a spatial practice.
place vs. space; place is personal, its a "past others are not allowed to read". Its also an impulse/an instinctual feeling of safety/wellbeing "I feel good here"
it is a spatial acting-out of th place (just as the speech act is an acoustic acting-out of language); a~ . . It 1mphes relations am on d1tterentiated ositions that is among~ matic "contracts" in the form of movements (just as verbal enunciatiogn is an "allocution," "posits another opposite" the speaker and puts con. tracts between interlocutors into action). 14 It thus seems possible to give a preliminary definition of walking as a space of enunciation
walking as speech; a way of customizing the city, making it yours (connection to mapping? a personal mapping? outside institutions if you're just wandering
Medieval or Renatssance pa~nters re~e city as seen in a persp~tive that no ey: had yet enJ_oyed.2 ~already made the medieval s ec-tator _mto a celesttal eye. lt created gods
The city as a celestial/other-wordly place. The phrase "created gods" really caught me. I think the city does inspire a fictional lore (ie. Gotham for NYC)
To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of ~Th
relating back to "place" vs "space. continuously walking through the city (space) looking for place.
Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future.
New York is constantly evolving and moving forward
~practices of space refer to a specific form of operations ("ways of operating"), to "another spatiality"6 (an "anthropological," poetic and mythic experience of space),
This relates to Tuan's ideas about space and place, and our definition of space as something intangible or empty, while place is specific.
ro be hfted to the summit of the World Trade Cent . o t f h . ' er ts to be l'f . u o t e City s grasp
"The city's grasp" reminds me of the personification of New York. We wouldn't usually say that a place has grasped a person, or that anyone is trapped or held by a space. That's something that's unique to New York.
World Trade Center
This is a particularly vivid example of how New York changes constantly.
They transmute the misfortune of their theories int theories of misfortune.
If the ministers knew they had a misfortune of theories, is he trying to say that the people that plan a city are fully aware that they are deteriorating it?.
hese names make themselves available to the diverse meanings given them by passers-by; they detach themselves from the places they were supposed to define a""ii_d ;rve as imaginary meeting-points on itineraries which, as metaphors, they determme for reasons that are foreign to their original value but may be recogmzed or not by passers-b~
The way we use street names now is more so for cognitive mapping rather than using the name to remember the value it holds or what it represents. I think this is very true, that we rarely think of a street name and wonder why it is so, it is usually just a part of an intinerary. e.g. subway stops
First, if it is true that a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possi-~ (e.g., by a place jn which one can move) and interdictions (e.g., ?Y a wall that prevents one from going further), then the walker actliai-izes some of these possibilities. In that way, he makes them exist as well as emerge. But he also moves them about and he invents others, since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, trans-form or ab .. andon spatial element,;;.
Describing how different spaces afford different behaviors for individuals
Today, whatever the avatars of this concept may have been, we have to acknowledge that if in discourse the city serves as a totalizing and almost mythical landmark for socioeconomic and political strategies, urban life increasingly permits the re-emergence of the element that the urbanistic project excluded
Cities are vital to economic and political strategies, modernizing ideas
Beneath the discourses that ideologize the city the ruses and combinations of powers that have no readable identity proliferate; without points where one can @hold of them, without rational transparency, they are impossible to ~er.
Without some type of distinguishable characteristics or categorization the city goes on disorganized
causes the ;:n triOn o 1 s own possibility-space itself-to be forgotten; space ~ . thus becomes the blind spot in a scientific and political technology.
Cities are made as a place and hold an infinite amount of places - however, it is being said that in the construction of cities, space itself is being forgotten, and it soon becomes simply a place with not many spaces.
The rdinary prac · · ers f the city live "down below," below the thresholds at which isibiJ'ty egins.
This suggests that the inhabitants of the city, the "ordinary practitioners," are not a part of the city's "imageability" or "visibility."
The trace left behind is substituted for the practice. It exhibits the (voracious) property that the geographical system has of being able to transform action into legibility, but in doing so it causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten.
If making maps legible puts them in a position of being forgotten, does that take away a cities value as a place? Is the Unfathomable city too legible? at what point is too descriptive of a map useless?
New York has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts.
What do we think New York would be like if it has "grown old" like Rome, and has maintained somewhat the same look as it had hundreds of years ago? Would the attraction to the city be just as grand?
Surveys of routes miss what was: the~ of passing by. The ;j,eration of walking, wandering, or "window shopping," that is, the activity of passers-by, is transformed into points that draw a totalizing and reversible line on the map.
Interesting connection to our previous study of what maps leave out and why alternative maps are needed.
inally, the creation of a universal and anonymous subject which is the city itself: it graaually becomes possible to attribute to it, as to its political model, Hobbes' State, all the functions and predicates that were previously scattered and assigned to many different real subjects-groups, associati<;>ns, or individuals. "The city," like a proper name, thus provides a way of conceiving and coilstructmg space on the basis of a hmte number of stable, tsolatable, and interconnected properties.
I really like this paragraph because it sums up the true nature of the city so perfectly. Like, it LITERALLY uses the words "universal" and "anonymous" to describe the same thing, and THAT is what a city is all about. It's literally a huge, ridiculous paradox that's got opposites on every single street corner. It's a really fun paragraph, very true paragraph, and definitely goes hand in hand with the opening of Unfathomable City
he childhood experience that dete · . . . rmmes spatJ 1 practices later develops 1ts effects, proliferates, floods private and pubt spaces, undoes their readable surfaces, and creates within th 1 JC c·t .. h. I" . . epanned J Y a metap onca or moblle ctty, like the one Kandinsky dream d " . . . e of-a great ctty bUilt accordmg to all the rules of architecture and the~ suddenly shaken by a force that defies all calculation.
The way we see the city stems from our childhood?
Traveling shows you what is lacking from the space you currently reside in. Opens up the mind.
Must one finally fall back into the dark s h b k pace w ere crowds ac and forth, crowds that, though visible from on high are them m,ove ~nable to see down below? An Icarian fall
All this talk about looking down on NYC like a god reminds me of the anonymity of the city that talked about in class. It seems that the only way to escape this persona is to be standing above it all, yet as soon as you step down and reach street level again, you're back to being a nobody
extremes of ambition and degradation, brutal oppositions of races and styles, contrasts between yesterday's buildings, already trans-formed into trash cans, and today's urban irruptions that block out its space.
This reminds me of how in Mistress America, there is talk of how the city is constantly under construction. The city is so fluid that it changes so much to the point where it is literally undefinable.
~emories tie us to that pla_se .... It's personal, not interesting to anyone else, but after all that's what gives a neighborhood its char-acter. "48
This goes back to the Tuan reading and what defines or separates place and space. I agree that memories or personal ties create a place for an individual. Your own place may not seem special to someone else, but that's why it's your own.
Perhaps cities are deteriorating along with the procedures that organized them.
Does this imply that the procedures or plans for a city can coincidently deteriorate it?
These practitioners ake use spaces that can t reseen; their knowledge of them is as 'n as that of lovers in each ~i's arms.-The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecog-~ized ~ in which each body is an element signed by many others, ~e r;gi6it!iiJit is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness.
"Walkers" or long time city dwellers know the underground places of a city, places that are unknown to newcomers. They organize a bustling city in their own way, with their own places, until it becomes home.
extremes of ambition and degradation, brutal oppositions of races and styles, contrasts between yesterday's buildings, already trans-formed into trash cans, and today's urban irruptions that block out its space.
the city as both opposition between forces and reflections of forces onto one another; this contributes to the idea that the city is overwhelmingly complex, which is a theme that the authors of Unfathomable City address in their introduction.
It is the analogue of t e acstmlle produced, through a projection that~ay of keeping 93 f by the space planner urbanist, cit lanner or carto ra her.
To what degree is the city a fictional representation created by an individual? Do the space planners or cartographers have power over the viewer because they have created or represented what is seen?
To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of ~The moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city itself ~n immense social experience of lacking a place
Tuan would see this as walking through space in a continuous search for place. place, here, is what this author considers "the proper"
Or we measure and map space andplace, and acquire spatial laws and resource inventories for ourefforts.
That's true, and I do see his point, but you cannot map space without mapping time, because those two are interconnected, thus the reason that space-time is a word, because one directly has impact on the other, so we have to take into account the laws of the universe (literally) when accessing preconceived ideologies of space.
None of this should be changedby the fact that Hamlet lived here, and yet it is changed completely
Worddd. Like, a place is a place first and foremost, regardless of who might've lived there. We're all people, and thus putting extra importance on some people and their property can be seen as a little silly. WHy enter a place just because someone lived there, we should be entering them for ourselves.
Place is security, space is freedom
This is beautiful. Like, I don't even feel like I have to expand upon it, because there's nothing I could say to make this super simple, elegant phrase better. It's perfectly put
He can articulate ideas but he has difficulty expressingwhat he knows through his senses of touch, taste, smell, hear-
How do we see this in real life when people can't explain what they experience? How does this effect individuals or society?
To experience in the.active sense re-quires that one venture forth into the unfamiliar and experi-ment with the elusive and the uncertain
One must leave their comfort zone in order to fully indulge in life's opportunities and experience new things.
Emotion tints all human experience, including the highflights of thought.
When you connect emotions to things, you diminish the true meaning of something
People tend to suppress that which they cannot express.
This quote is interesting and rings true in many situations. When people have trouble understanding or expressing something, they tend to avoid it or push it away instead of inquiring or trying harder. They'll turn their heads and pretend to not know rather then to not understand.
From the security and stability of place we are awareof the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa.
relates back to moving to and from New York to Los Angeles. Leaving security to reach freedom - which could work in both situations. The correlation between place and space is very interesting.
Place is security, space is freedom
when you know where you are and you are surrounded by familiar things, you tend to feel more secure. But when you are secluded you may feel more free. Goes back to the idea of never being able to be "lost" in the city.
"Space" ismore abstract than "place."
This may be because space is an emptier concept than place. When "place" is spoken aloud, what is visualized is a tangible thing, for example a building. When "space" is spoken aloud, what is visualized is emptiness and openness, often in vast contexts.
Experience has a connotation of passivity; the word suggestswhat a person has undergone or suffered.
The experienced city dwellers are the ones writing the passages we have read in class, reflecting on their personal experiences or touting their knowledge as their "experience." Does this mean that they have suffered at the hand of the city, if the connotation rings true?
Berlin, too, gave Tillich afeeling of openness, infinity, unrestricted space
Similar to Tracy's quote about NYC/Brooke in Mistress America: "Being in New York, it made you want to find life, not hide from it."
Moreover, by shifting fromone place to another, a person acquires a sense of direction
Through different definitions, this could describe LA or NY. LA provides the physical space that gives one freedom to explore and find a place where one feels comfortable. Whereas, NY has space in the sense of the numerous opportunities the city offers. People shift from one passion to another until they find the direction/career path they want to follow.
What begins as undifferentiatedspace becomes place as we get to know it better and endow itwith value.
It's interesting how space is only given value when it becomes a place. Does that mean we value security more than freedom? Allotted meanings/value gradually tear away at the freedom spaces had before being defined.
Given the human endowment, in what ways do people attachmeaning to and organize space and place?
What's the importance in applying meaning to every place and space? Why can't people just be?
unrestricted space
Places without space can make one feel restricted/trapped. In NYC, all the opportunities and businesses are all packed into a small space, and as Didion explains, it's like being at the fair too long. LA to her, felt more like home. Maybe the space in LA is a reason for why she left.
From the security and stability of place we are awareof the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa
The threat of space seems especially important in the city, where private versus public space is constantly changing and a difficult concept to understand fully.
an olfactory worldwould be one where odors are spatially disposed, not simplyone in which they appear in random succession or as inchoatemixtures. Can senses other than sight and touch provide aspatially organized world? It is possible to argue that taste,odor, and even hearing cannot in themselves give us a sense ofspace.
sense of a smell as a method of spacial organization and awareness. distinctive smells corresponding to specific environments
Experience thus implies theability to learn from what one has undergone.3 To experience isto learn; it means acting on the given and creating out of thegiven. The given cannot be known in itself. What can be knownis a reality that is a construct of experience, a creation of feelingand thought.
apply to Didion, Devore, Brooke. Thinking of life in the city as a learning experience. Its not a waste of time if you've learned from it
9Experiential PerspectiveExperience is directed to the external world. Seeing andthinking clearly reach out beyond the self. Feeling is moreambiguous. As Paul Ricoeur put it, "Feeling is ...withoutdoubt intentional: it is a feeling of 'something'—the lovable,the hateful, [for instance]. But it is a very strange intentionalitywhich on the one hand designates qualities felt on things, onpersons, on the world, and on the other hand manifests andreveals the way in which the self is inwardly affected." In feel-ing "an intention and an affection coincide in the same experi-ence.
if feelings are directed on the external world then they would be reflected onto the city --> the city as a representation of the values/attitudes/emotions of its inhabitants
How the human person, who isanimal, fantasist, and computer combined, experiences andunderstands the world is the central theme of this book
the complexity, multi-layered nature of people is reflected in cities. part of what contributes to the chaotic vibe
None of this should be changedby the fact that Hamlet lived here, and yet it is changed completely.
is it possible for us to enter a space without any preconceived ideas?
What begins as undifferentiatedspace becomes place as we get to know it better and endow itwith value.
Was Didion unable to make New York the space into a place? It seems like she had a difficult time creating a home in NY and therefore didn't see its value.
Place is security, space is freedom
interesting when considered along with our conversation of NY and LA. While they are both large cities, LA provides more space which can provide mental and physical freedom. Perhaps this is what Didion and Devore were in search of.
Long residence enables us to know a place intimately,yet its image may lack sharpness unless we can also see it fromthe outside and reflect upon our experience.
This is exactly what Didion and DeVore did when writing about New York from Los Angeles!
Space is experienced directlyas having room in which to move
What do you call somewhere where there is no space? Does such a place, in literal terms, exist?
openness, freedom, and threat of space
space is described as having openness and freedom, words commonly associated as positive, and threat, a word that carries a negative connotation. this displays the complex nature of space
A blind man told William James that "hethought few seeing people could enjoy the view from a moun-tain top more than he."
He sees by hearing the vastness of a space
A longtimeresident of Minneapolis knows the city, a cabdriver learns tofind his way in it, a geographer studies Minneapolis and knowsthe city conceptually. These are three kinds of experiencing.
Are there more kinds of experiencing?
Recent ethological studies show that nonhuman animals alsohave a sense of territory and of place.
Place is an instinct of all animals. It is natural to have or to desire a place.
The organization of human space is uniquely dependent onsight. Other senses expand and enrich visual space. Thussound enlarges one's spatial awareness to include areas behindthe head that cannot be seen. More important, sounddramatizes spatial experience. Soundless space feels calm andlifeless despite the visible flow of activity in it, as in watchingevents through binoculars or on the television screen with thesound turned off, or being in a city muffled in a fresh blanket ofsnow.17Human spaces reflect the quality of the human senses andmentality.
(Space and Place) This passage describes how one makes observations and judgements about certain space.
Experience is a cover-all term for the various modes throughwhich a person knows and constructs a reality. Thesemodes range from the more direct and passive senses ofsmell, taste, and touch, to active visual perception and theindirect mode of symbolization.
(Space and Place) Prior information stored in your brain gives you a "symbolization" of a certain reality
Isn't it strange how this castle changes as soon as one imagines thatHamlet lived here?
(Space and Place) This point depicts how our opinions of places are altered due to our previous knowledge of the specific area.
It must be granted that there is some value in mystification, labyrinth, or surprise in the environment.
Tru, because who wants to live somewhere that they're 150% sure of every single day??? SOunds boringggg
A beautiful and delightful city environment is an oddity, some would say an impossibility.
I like this line, because it's rather true. You don't move to a city for the beauty for the scenery, you move for the opportunity. As opposed to maybe a small farm town, or something of that sense. You have to know what you're getting into, and what you're trying to achieve
But let the mishap of disorientation once occur, and the sense of anxiety and even ter-ror that accompanies it reveals to us how closely it is linked to our sense of balance and well-being.
people become very familiar and comfortable in their surroundings over time. with the rise of technology, it makes it almost impossible to get lost or feel lost because you can always find your way home or to a certain location. Why may one want to feel lost?
Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequen.ces of events leading up to it, the mem-ory. of past experiences
people connect memories and emotions to locations. surroundings can trigger or remind someone of the past.
While such devices are extremely useful for providing condensed data on interconnections, they are also precarious, since orientation fails if the device is lost, and the device itself must constantly be referred and fitted to reality.
This connects to the modern world....Everyone seems to be lost without their phones. We are so connected to something that makes our lives so much simpler and easier, but when we lose them, orientation seems to be lost.
a legible city would be one whose districts or landmarks or pathways are easily identifiable and are easily grouped into an over-all pattern.
Again, the stressed importance of the "districts, edges, paths, nodes and landmarks" that were emphasized in "Image of the City"
the apparent clarity or "legibility" of the cityscape
Juxtaposed with the "imageability" of the urban environment discussed in "Image of the City"
Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequen.ces of events leading up to it, the mem-ory. of past experiences.
Said in the video "How to Live in a City:"
"People in the city have a desperate need to be a part of their surroundings, to personalize them... Neighborhood identity must be found beyond these bleak facades."
Only powerful civilizations can begin to act on their total environment at a significant scale. The conscious remold-ing of the large-scale physical environment has b:en poss~b.le ~nly recently, and so the problem of environmental 1mageab1hty is a new one.
Is Environmental Imaginability really new though, just because cities are relatively new to humans? People have been innovating landscapes for thousands of years, maybe not cities, but different environments have been created, and societies have flourished.
two-way process between the observer and his environment. The environment suggests distinctions and relations, and the observer-with great adaptability and in the light of his own purposes-selects, organ-izes, and endows with meaning what he sees
The environment=NYC- has a fluid/malleable structure full of possibilities The observers= New Yorkers- have their own individual goals/purposes and can take what NYC offers and find their passion
The need to recognize and pattern our surroundings is so crucial, and has such long roots in the past, that this image has wide practical and emotional importance to the individual
Do cities, NYC in particular, have this necessary, identifiable pattern in its surroundings? Although NYC has an overall identity and personality that is recognized by many, it is also constantly changing.
It is that shape, color, or arrangement which facilitates the making of vividly identified, powerfully structured, highly useful mental images of the environmen
This recalls the earlier idea that the city is made up of different sights, sounds, smells, etc
a thing perceived only in the course of long spans of time
The city cannot be completely understood or explored immediately. One cannot comprehend the depths of the city until after being immersed there for a while.
Like any good framework, such a structure gives the individual a pos-sibility of choice md a starting-point for the acquisition of fur-ther information.
This touches on the organization of the city as a grid
We are not simply observers of this spectacle, but are ourselves a part of it; on the stage with the other participants.
One does not watch/observe the city. One becomes a part of the city. (mozaic or melting pot?)
But let the mishap of disorientation once occur, and the sense of anxiety and even ter-ror that accompanies it reveals to us how closely it is linked to our sense of balance and well-being
Does living in a city provide us with a "sense of balance and well-being?
This book will assert that legibility is crucial in the city setting, will analyze it in some detail, and will try to show how this concept might be used today in rebuilding our cities
The author's thesis statement
a thing perceived only in the course of long spans of time
This relates to Didion's ideas about the city being not just a physical space but a construction of time.
There arc:: other basic properties in a beautiful envi-ronment: meaning or expressiveness, sensuous delight, rhythm, stimulus, choice. Our concentration on imageability does not deny their importance. Our purpose is simply to consider the need for identity and structure in our perceptual world, and to illustrate the special relevance of this quality to the particular case of the complex, shifting urban environme
imageable goes beyond beautiful. implies a symmetry, common aesthetic that creates a sense of order in an other wise hectic environment
Although clarity or legibility is by no means the only impor-tant property of a beautiful city, it is of special importance when considering environments at the urban scale of size, time, and complexity. To understand this, we must consider not just the city as a thing in itself, but the city being perceived by its inhab-itants.
Clarity and legibility are tools to understand and discuss the environment of a city, not to strictly categorize it into a box (?) Tools to help us make sense of our surroundings
here is no final result, only a continuous succession of phases. No wonder, then, that the art of shaping cities for sensuous enjoyment is an art quite separate from architecture or music or literature
Ties in with Brooke's comment about construction. The city is always developing/transforming etc. It's not static by any means
Every citizen has had long associations with some part of his city, and his image is soaked in memories and meanings
I find "his city" interesting. There is a type of ownership people feel for the city they grew up in or have lived in for a long time. It means something different and special for each person that experiences it
ooking at cities can give a· special pleasure, however commonplace the sight may be.
Immediately provides a contrast to how people traditionally see cities
hey are clear enough about the ugliness of the world they live in, and they are quite vocal about the dirt, the smoke, the heat, and the congestion, the chaos and yet the monot-ony of it. But they are hardly aware of the potential value of harmonious surroundings, a world which they may have briefly glimpsed only as tourists or as escaped vacationers.
continues the idea that those who live in cities are jaded. Although tourists are seen as annoying and out of place, they highlight what makes the city special and appreciate things more.
While it may be stable in general outlines for some time, it is ever changin~ in detail.
Last class we established that in Mistress America construction was a metaphor for internal change that one goes through as a result of living in a city. Since the city is "ever-changing" would it be possible for us to remain unchanged while living there?
Not only is the city an object which is perceived (and perhaps enjoyed) by millions of people of widely diverse class and char-acter, but it is the product of many builders who are constantly modifying the structure for reasons of their ow
the city is so specific to the individual; we could all be living in the same city, seeing the same things, but experiencing them in entirely different ways
To become completely lost is perhaps a rather rare experience for most people in the modern city.
this conversation is not even applicable to current society. it has shifted from rather rare to impossible through usage of smartphones (iMaps, subway apps, etc.)
Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequen.ces of events leading up to it, the mem-ory. of past experiences
people are drawn to things that feel like "home," whatever that means to them. when moving to the city, they may try to control the city so as to fit their expectations and make it feel like their past reality.
In the same way, we must learn to see the hidden forms in the vast sprawl of our cities. We are not accustomed to organizing and imaging an artificial environment on such a large scale; yet our activities are pushing us toward that end.
utilizing all of the body's senses to observe on another level
ach individual creates and bears. his own image, but there see°:s to be substantial agreement among mem-bers of the same group. It is these group images, exhibiting con-set'l.sus a~ong significant numbers, that interest city planners who aspire to model an environment that will be used by many people.
Does every individual fall into some type of group?
At every instant, there is more than the eye can see, more than the ear can hear, a setting or a view waiting to be explored.
The city is so vast and grand that one could never explore everything it has to offer, no matter how long they live here. There are endless things to see and do. Creates a fear of missing out.
An environmental image may be analyzed into three compo-nents: identity, structure, and meaning. It is useful to abstract these for analysis, if it is remembered that in· reality they always appear together
(The Image of the City) How to interpret an image
Moving elements in a city, and in particular the people and their activities, are as important as the stationary physical parts. We are not simply observers of this spectacle, but are ourselves a part of it; on the stage with the other participants.
(The Image of the City) Coexistence of people and the objects around them
Fall to your knees and thank New York for making you strong.
references the animinity of living in the city. the idea that "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" and living in the city truly makes you stronger by pushing you down.
Complaining is the natural opera of New York.
everyone is constantly complaining about the city.
New York will briefly study my face and mutter “Who the fuck are you?"
the love he has for the city is unrequited and anonymous
Hell, maybe your kin will survive the apocalypse and sing mighty ballads of your tragic battles by a roaring bonfire.
He calls New York a monster earlier on ("Cthulhu" and "Galactus"), and now compares surviving New York to surviving the apocalypse.
New York City doesn’t love you. Why would think you’re in a relationship with New York? It’s not a boyfriend or a parent. New York will never give you its approval because New York City is too busy being New York City to care about you.
anonymity/loneliness
Struggle, motherfucker. Hustle. Fail, fail again, fail until you forget what succeeding is, and then, on your deathbed, as you’re full of rotten phlegm and regret, you can look back and crack a smile that you won a couple, and survived everything else.
Advice about living in NYC ( wise words from someone who has lived the struggle that NYC causes its residents)
Struggle, motherfucker. Hustle. Fail, fail again, fail until you forget what succeeding is, and then, on your deathbed, as you’re full of rotten phlegm and regret, you can look back and crack a smile that you won a couple, and survived everything else.
Callous reiteration of Dorot's advice
The only personal journey New York is interested in is the one that ends with you paying your yearly city income tax
Far more dispassionate than in Didion's description
Winter and New York have been at war for centuries
New York is often personified in writing
I love New York. My love is strong. My love is psycho.
Brings in a new level of the love/hate relationship: treating the city like an ex.
Stop whining
He later says "Don't whine, but always complain," which echoes this line.
one of those “Why I Left New York” essays on the off chance that New York would notice.
One could say that Didion's piece is an example of one of these essays.
5AM
The Didion piece also references 5am as a time when people who party are still awake; it seems like they both use it as an odd hour when odd things happen.
New York will never give you its approval because New York City is too busy being New York City to care about you.
animintiy
That’s a lie, of course. They were all assholes. Just cranky, angry people.
no optimism allowed? does he see any positives?
New York will kick you in the hole, but it will never stab you in the back. It will, however, stab you multiple times right in your face.
More of a direct approach, not subtle
New York will briefly study my face and mutter “Who the fuck are you?"
The anonymity of living in NYC, no matter how long your stay
Avoid the romantics
Ditching the romanticized images of NYC - central theme linking all of our readings
that New York is a giant meatgrinder extruding tons of chewed up dreams.
Connection to The Coming Bachelor Girl: "...come on to New York... and no place offers greater discouragements against that success until it has become assured."
Jay Z and Beyonce are doing okay.
Humour that only the famous can make it in NYC!
It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysteri-ous nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of "living" there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not "live" at Xanadu.
New comers to NY view the city as a dream. Once one lives in the city, miraculous---mundane
Some years passed, but I still did not lose that sense of wonder about New York. I began to cherish the loneliness of it, the sense that at any given time no one need know where I was or what I was doing.
anonymity
Fair ..
NY is temporary--eventually need an escape
ew York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysteri-ous nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.
New York is constantly dramatized and romanticized by people from the country. It has a sense of mysteriousness and holds all these things that people soon learn are unattainable. To the narrator, nyc creates and destroys dreams.
ew York is just a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for people to live. B
how city people view New York - not as dramatized.
hat it is like to be young in New York, how six months can become eight years wit
in a busy city, time may blend together. life passes by fast.
ogrammed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In
preconceived notions on New York were incorrect leading in dissapointment
a bad cold and a high fever.
Reminds me of Alcott's thoughts on the theatre and contagion.
golden rhythm
What does she mean by golden rhythm?
a six-month leave of absence
This line recalls how she once said she would only stay in New York for six months.
it had counted after all,
A callback to her repeated idea that things didn't matter.
that first spring
She focuses a lot on the time of year and the weather when contextualizing her stories.
I stopped believing in new faces
She's referencing her earlier story where her friend doesn't believe in parties with new faces, and at this point in the story she has started to believe him.
my twenty-eighth,
She keeps a consistent reference to her age throughout the story, and always references it like one usually references the year.
and none of it would count
Repeated from the last paragraph.
and none of it would matter
This phrase and idea is echoed later on.
the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was.
This can be compared to our conversation about the jaded bitterness and love/hate relationship that native New Yorkers feel towards the city.
They seemed to be in New York as I was, on some · definitely extended. leave from wherever they be-longed, disinclined to consider the future, temporary exiles who al ays knew when the flights left for New Orleans or ' Memphis or Richmond or, in my case, California.
new york never really seemed like home. A guest in someone elses city
I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come-was anyone ever so young?
the author seems scared to look foolish in the big city
all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York
romanticized vision of new york city is usually not accurate
I still believed in possi-bilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.
Dorot writes in The Coming Bachelor Girl: "You must work, work, work, or else you never will be that 'something' that sounds more vague and not one half so grand as the years crawl dismally along."
Didion makes a very vague statement about the "extraordinary" and "possibilities" that align with the mindset of the coming bachelor girl Dorot was advising directly.
I enter a revolving door at twenty and come out a good deal older, and on a different street.
Older seems to have a wearied connotation in this use; implications of the city shaping her and displaying her "malleability"
That first night I opened my wi1dow on the bus into town and watched for the sky-line, but all I could see were the wastes of Queens and the big sig s that said MIDTOWN TUNNEL IBIS LANE
Didion's romanticized image of New York begins to fade almost as quickly as she arrives
In these three portraits in villainy-the youth's urban compan-ion, the demagogue, and the gambler/speculator-the writers .of antebellum advice literature expressed a deep disenchantment with the direction of historical change in early nineteenth-century America.
The Era of the Confidence Man( 3 types of man shown throughout the text)
The contaminating powers of / the confidence man sprang from his social formlessness, his mar-. ginality, but his youthful victim was also socially formless, Iiminal.
How he got his powahhhhssssss
The confidence man served as a symbolic expression of the dangers of marginality in a society of placeless men.
Couldn't have summed up that one line in like 5 pages?? no?? too little work????
In these three portraits in villainy-the youth's urban compan-ion, the demagogue, and the gambler/speculator-the writers .of antebellum advice literature expressed a deep disenchantment with the direction of historical change in early nineteenth-century America.
Important because it's a theme that's runnin through this paper!!
Gambling w ·1 b · d d h' as ev1 ecause t 1t pro uce not mg:
Intersting
Rather than have a child of mine seduced by the flatteries and black treachery of these foul destroyers I would se h' l. · h d . • e 1m strugg mg w~t eath-~1s ey~ si1:1king, his breast heaving, his heart throbbu~g-throbbmg with its last pulsations .... I would return from his grave thankful that he rests
Okay. So. I don't have a son, so i'm not exactly an expert, BUT I think this is a LITTLE extreme maybe.
Popular biographies of self-made men-politicians, businessmen, even artists ~nd int~llectu~ls-proclaimed the faith that, in the boundless American social environ-ment, any man might rise to any position in life
Like how Rockefeller and Carnegie did. It was the Gilded Age in which nobody had any social moility, yet the prospect of making it still echoed in people's weak, tired hearts.
he decline of parental and employer authority, they feared, had given free rein to what later g~n~r~tions wou!d call peer pressure.
Important to keep this in mind, because people were scared, as they often are, of losing traditional values.
By nature, the confidence man defied social definition; he was a man of shifting masks and roles, without fixed status or profession.
He was like a social chameleon
The confidence game was not simply a literary device intended to persuade young men not to consort with gamblers and dandies and pimps. It was a symbolic expression of deeper fears about ~~e direction of American society.
Very important to note about the fears of these types of men, and why they were so big and looming to the American public.
Themes of doom and decline and vivid rhetorical images of a violent breakdown of social order began to dominate discussions of the state of the republic.«
All bcs 2 old people died! Amazing!
America was passing through a critical period when its character was not yet formed,
Important to note that in the history of the confidence man
American Whigs interpreted all events as part of a system-atic plot to corrupt and enslave them.
kinda like how American Republicans are in this day and age! Amazing!
the confidence man had one ultimate pμrpose: the total enslavement of his victim.
The ultimate goal at any cost!!!!
"One of the indige-nous characters who has figured long in our journals, courts and cities, is 'the Confidence Man'; his doings form one of the staJes of villainy, and an element in the romance of roguery. Countless are the dodges att~ibuted to this ubiquitous personage."
forged out of the particular american identity
Men there are, who, without a pang or gleam of remorse, will coolly wait for character to rot, and health to sink, and means to melt, that they may suck up the last drop of the victim's blood.
melodramatic demonization as scare tactic
common man.'
How is he defining the common man?
The growing importance of women's friendships between 1780 and 1835,
Is this why advice from women to women like in "The Coming Bachelor Girl" was popular during this time?
their concerns for youthful readers were clearly grounded in reality.
"The Coming Bachelor Girl" could be one of these advice-givers that speaks to the youthful audience.
contagion
We can compare this with Alcott's ideas about the contagion of the theatre, and in turn, the city.
America was passing through a critical period when its character was not yet formed,
Similar to the youth that traveled to the city in search of "something more"
the malleability of the youthful character.
The basis of the confidence man's motives and the source of the authors of the advice manuals' anxieties
Although the term confidence man does not appear in the advice manuals, it accurately identifies the villain of the piece
What exactly is the confidence man?
he "M-factor" that has shaped the American national character: movement, migration, mobility. He was, first of all, a wanderer, independent of any fixed social nexus of community, family, or permanent friends. His geographical mobility determined a second distinguishing characteristic: his up-ward social mobility.
conservative writers are also conserned about their social status. confidence men symbolize the "nouveau riche", people that are working their way up/"self made men". Threatening to people that are in their social position by birth (or profession in the case of the clergy)
vertical institutions could not contain the new complexity of national social life, new social organizations emerged that were formed along the horizontal lines of e~onomic class and social status-organizations such as medical societies, mechanics' institu-tions, benevolent fraternities, charitable assoqations, and political clubs. Membership in these new organizations ~snot hereditary or compulsory, but voluntary; the pattern of authority was not one of .,. mastery and deference, but one of equality.
threatened by the social ramifications of economic changes. the patriarchal/religious system is becoming rapidly antiquated. conservative writers are worried that their influence is slipping and they're trying to scare young people into letting them preserve their power