urbanism

as i'm studying for my urbanism final tomorrow night, i wanted to share this ah-ha moment from our last class. besides the bubbles and circles being beautiful, its so interesting to see the united states through this new lens. it makes sense, a perfect product of post modernity. there is little logic to the old hierarchies of urban and rural anymore. everything is much more regional now. according to our teacher, it's just up to policy and government to catch on to it all. (more public transportation please!)

our latest reading, robert fishman's "megaopolis," introduced the idea of the "city a la carte." it's so accurate. (and all about connecting dots...) the idea is that everyone has a different "city" made of different nodes of experience. the control is in the individual, but that makes it even more impossible to control or categorize from outside. (but let's face it, our city planners and government have never had control...) we basically bounce around between a household bubble, consumption bubble, and a production bubble. to me, this freedom sounds refreshing. (aside from the fact that the typical structure of the city a la carte is the world of shopping malls we have created for ourselves.) when ancb started, it was all about breaking down the walls between homogeneous neighborhoods. looking at it now, baltimore should be more about the individual neighborhoods that each resident makes for themselves. the possibilities with that approach are much greater. think about molding a baltimore second grader's city into one that includes, say, the baltimore museum of art and excludes the drug dealers on the corner.