place
Pointing
"Originally I marked these places, quite literally. I laid a small concrete block flush to the ground at the place where I was standing and stretched a stainless steel piano wire out toward the horizon. It might go off a mile; it simply pointed in a direction. And that was the piece."
The ritualized use of a place
The association of comfort with people and place are reinforced by the ritualized use of a place. Using a place at a set time and in a specific manner creates a constancy as dependable as the place itself. It establishes, in time and behavior, a definition of place as strong as any architectural spatial definition, such as an aedicula, might be. Ritualized use can do more than reinforce the affection for a place. Through ritual, a place becomes an essential element in the customs of a people.
Touring SoHo
SoHo has, however, become part of a tourist archipelago where the definition of place falls into a set of increasingly generic categories. The act of touring devolves less on the particulars of geography than on the consumption of a set of prepackaged lifestyles, defined by a fixed array of goods and services. Almost every city in America now boasts a SoHo equivalent.
We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness
Places I will never go
There are places I will never go. Due to laziness or boredom, or premature fatigue. But there are also landscapes or buildings I should have visited a long time ago. This text reviews those possible places. All of them are part of my story, and they are places I am familiar with in one way or another.
To become completely lost
To become completely lost is perhaps a rather rare experience for most people in the modern city. We are supported by the presence of others and by special way-finding devices: maps, street numbers, route signs, bus placards. But let the mishap of disorientation once occur, and the sense of anxiety and even terror that accompanies it reveals to us how closely it is linked to our sense of balance and well-being. The very word "lost" in our language means much more than simple geographical uncertainty; it carries overtones of utter disaster.
On the edge of something else
The most common response to the question of symbolism was nothing in the city at all, but rather the sight of the New York City skyline across the river. Much of the characteristic feeling for Jersey City seemed to be that it was a place on the edge of something else.
Introverts and extroverts
Some regions are introvert, turned in upon themselves with little reference to the city outside them, such as Boston's North End or Chinatown. Others may be extrovert, turned outward and connected to surrounding elements. The common visibly touches neighboring regions, despite its inner path confusions.
The Image of the City
A Book by Kevin Lynch- To become completely lost
- Apparency
- On the edge of something else
- Nothing there, after all
- Paths, edges, districts, nodes, landmarks
The Third Way
An Article by Kevin KellyBut all the civilized cities of the world were also filled with third places that people loved. Not quite private, not quite public, these third places were intimate but open to anyone. Like settling down at a table at a cafe. It felt like your space, but you were not the landlord. They were public, open spaces that you could “own” for a while.
…We need a new third category of work — something between “employee” and “not an employee”—that encompasses digital gig laborers. AirBnB is neither a hotel, nor a private resident. It is a third thing, and we need to create a new category to deal with it…This is the era of the third way.
On Memory Palaces & Visual Computation
An Essay by Taulant SulkoI now use Are.na as a Memory Palace, separating my channels into rooms. For example, I have a channel that I call the Computation Room. It’s pretty generic and includes any type of block that relates to computation.
If I notice a pattern in the computation room I create a more specific channel in that room. I think of that more specific topic as an object within the room.
Then there are the adjacent topics that I often find even more exciting to focus on. For those, I choose a name that corresponds with the nature of a room and also its size. For example I have a channel called the Visual Computing Observatory. In my head I am imagining an actual observatory where I am looking and observing and studying a given topic.
The Method of Loci
An ArticleFrom the time we learn to walk, we start building up spatial memories—recollections of the layouts of physical spaces and their relationships to the objects in them. These memories tend to form fast and stick around for a long time.
The method of loci hijacks our innate aptitude for remembering physical spaces, using it to help us remember other kinds of information with greater ease.
Not Just a New Feature; a New Compact
A Fragment by Jorge ArangoMy sense is that Slack’s teams think of themselves as adding ‘features’ to a ‘product,’ instead of as stewards of a place where people work.
The Right Tools for the Job
Tool-building is an essential but poorly incentivized component of academic geography and social science more broadly. To conduct better science, we need to
build better tools.
A representational tension
Do I need to know the precise polygonal geometries of Los Angeles and the University of Southern California to assert that the latter is within the former? No. My mind contains no such precise geometric model of points and lines, yet I know that USC is in Los Angeles. When humans reason with the real world, they focus on its objects, relations, and processes—rather than starting with geometry—because these are the keys to understanding and explaining the real world. Our GIS tools, however, usually do the opposite. Built from the geometry-up around the legacy logic of traditional cartography (geometries and layers), most GIS tools today are restricted by that legacy’s limited ability to model objects, relations, and processes. A representational tension thus exists in GIScience between being a geometric information science versus an ontological, relational, and processual information science.
The teleology of tool-building
The teleology of tool-building suggests that the real value lies in the end use of the tool, rather than in its origins
Urban form and grain
One square mile of different cities' street networks, held at the same scale to compare the urban form and grain.
Software often feels inevitable
Software often feels inevitable because its backstory is often invisible. We click a download link, run an installer, and suddenly have a new tool to use. Yet this conceals years of human decisions, experiences, and constraints shaping software outcomes that are in no way pre-destined.