CityLab – Best #Cityreads of the Week)
Jan 30, 2016
Chaz Hutton A roundup of the best stories on cities and urbanism we’ve come across in the past seven days.Tweet us your favorites with #CityReads.
“Drawing the ‘Map of Every City’,” Chaz Hutton, Medium
Last weekend I drew a map on a post-it note. Then I posted it on Twitter. 48 hours later it had 3000 re-tweets. Here’s (I think) why that happened…
The map isn’t a map of a city in the literal sense. Sure, the layout of the graphic mimics that of a map, with areas arranged in 2 dimensional space, with two bridges and a river lending it some kind of geographical framework.
However, it’s not actually a map of a city, not in the traditional sense anyway. Rather it’s a map of people’s experience of living in cities: The changing circumstances of people as they get older and have children, the way ‘cool’ areas emerge from formerly ‘rough’ areas and are then invariably compared to the less-cool, traditionally wealthy areas, the kind of areas that an Ikea needs to be built for it to be profitable. All these things are endemic to most large cities, with most of them the outcomes of events situated at some point along the gentrification arc.
