Rochester’s Inner Loop was once the envy of urbanization. That was in the 1960s, when American cities were redesigned entirely to accommodate the car as a signal of a better future, much like elsewhere. Thanks to the speed at which Kodak and Xerox executives, for instance, could shift between their offices and suburban homes, Rochester earned the reputation of having the shortest commute in all of the U.S.
Continue reading “Rochester’s Very Own Uberlin Wall”
I’ve always had an amateurish interest in cities: how they work, how they’re built, what makes one likeable and another not. Walking around a new place, seeing new types of buildings and how things are organized, is one of my favorite things to do.
In college, I came across Guy Debord and Situationism, and became interested in the concept of the dérive, which gave a cool, avant-garde, and sort of subversive edge to walking around. My closest friends at the time and I actually spent most of our time walking around the small city where we we went to school.
Continue reading “Providence Circa 1998, Walking Around Cities, and Unlikely Populism”