Working Scenarios

Scene 1
Ron is a poet. He finds his music in the mundane. Unfortunately he's also a full-time bartender and he can't get out to find his everyday muse in his banal surrounds. Confined to the internet he stumbles upon the Strip Mall Ethnography. He muses on the significance of having two Ethiopian restaurants, a Mexican grocery and a Dollar Store in one place. He sees the negative capability inherent in the shopping center experience. He decides to write his suburban-inspired epic and return to school to get his MFA.


Scene 2
Shannon works for the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce. She's been looking for ways to express the vibrant, cosmopolitan nature of certain areas around Atlanta to young, well-educated, affluent profesionals looking to move to Atlanta, but Google Maps shows her city as a mass of push-pins and strip malls. To make matters worse, Everyblock has started showing tons of crime data around fledgling areas of commerce.

Shannon wants people to understand that there's more to Atlanta than crime data and push-pins, that strip malls are not commodified culture, but sites of culture and diversity in earnest. She's suggested that Strip Mall Ethnography be added to the CoC's web-site to give a more accurate portrayal of what Atlanta's shopping landscape has to offer.


Scene 3
Tom is a worker's rights activist. He wants to find an ideal setting for staging a statement of resistance in a public setting. By engaging the Strip Mall Ethnography he discovers that day laborers congregate at a strip mall a mere three miles from one of the poshest strip malls in Atlanta. Through some organizing and coaxing, he manages to convince two dozen workers to congregate at the posh shopping center for a week. By Friday he has generated media coverage and brought attention to the unfair working conditions many day laborers are subjected to in one of Atlanta's most affluent neighborhoods.


Scene 4
Alastair is a cultural critic and PhD candidate in England. He's convinced, thanks to reading too much Baudrillard, that America is series of cookie-cutter culture blocks, conveniently situated along endless miles of black-top. He sees the seemingly endless, homogenous listings for Targets and Wal-Marts as prime evidence to support his thesis: American culture is dead.

Alastair's rival, Frank, contends that American culture is still a vital and influential force in the world. That strip malls may seem like vapid, mass produced outlets of goods and ideas, but they are in fact complex parts of a larger system that inform potent individual landscapes.

The two create a lively discourse over Strip Mall Ethnography. Frank posits that the trends that come to the fore within the documentation show strip malls to be robust and culturally diverse sites. Alastair counters that these "sites" are ultimately subject to the politics of ownership and can therefore be considered only as points of sale for the commodified culture defined by corporate information brokers. Frank then rebuts, with the help of Strip Mall Ethnography, that while buying and selling may be the exigence for the a strip mall's existence, more than commerce takes place at a strip mall. They are, indeed sites of possible resistence and difference.


Scene 5
Carol is a high school teacher. She's been excited to work with the Center for Urban Pedagogy, but she wants her students to make something other than a video documentary or print campaign. She's been checking out the Strip Mall Ethnography and wants her students to take the Bronx Bodega Project a step further, turning the data used in the documentary into a web-based digital expression, using maps to geographically situate the data and realizing the physical context the bodega infrastructure occupies.

Strip Mall Ethnography: A Definite Direction

I consider making the fundamental decision of subject to be the most challenging aspect of this project. I've chosen a pretty broad topic/exercise: attempting to image subjective and alternative aspects of the city experience. So many aspects of urban occurrences and experiences are left out of digital expressions.

So where to? I've considered many things. Seeing as I bike around Atlanta a lot, I thought about focusing in that direction. Investigating the cycling community around Atlanta, where cyclists congregate, figuring out why, etc..

I also thought about investigating bike accidents. So many cyclists I've met have been hit by cars and every one of them has had the driver speed off. This usually leads the cyclist conclude that filing a police report would be a waste of time. Yikes. I considered this to be a worthwhile direction in that there are rich and compelling data sets that feed into the phenomena (e.g. traffic patterns, road infrastructure, medical expenses, bike repair expenses, cyclist narratives, a perceived failure of law enforcement, etc.) and few people really seem to be aware of the experience of being a cyclist in Atlanta.

Still, I wasn't getting that "falling in love" feeling that I want to get from my Master's Project topic. So I returned to a topic that I thought of – and really liked – last Fall while working in the Public Design Workshop: Strip Mall Ethnography.

Growing up in the DC suburbs I had come to expect that strip malls were a purely suburban phenomenon. Atlanta, a city of considerable size and population, is a sprawling metropolitan complex filled with strip malls. I had proposed that it might be interesting to take panoramic photos of strip malls around Atlanta using Gigapan technology. Now, returning to this idea a year later, I want to arrive at a better understanding of communities around Atlanta through the lens of the strip mall.

My focus is still quite broad, but now I have a course of action. In the coming weeks I'm going to head out and start taking panoramas of strip malls all over Atlanta as well as digging into possible data sets (e.g. plans/blueprints, commerce/retail economic data, housing demographics surrounding strip malls, etc.). The hope is that I will then have some rich data with which I can make new, interesting and illuminating connections.

Up next: a two-part post on work that will help contextualize my work, stay tuned.

Subjectively Imaging Atlanta

This blog intends to document the process of my master's project. Below you'll find the very nascent inklings of what I hope will become a solid, narrowly scoped investigation of my experience in the city of Atlanta. This blog will serve as a repository of analogous projects, writings and images that will serve to inform my work.

About the project…

How do we imagine our city spaces? How would a Google map: account for a good spot to watch a sunset cascade from a skyscraper; intimate the precarious – yet thrilling – nature of a parking lot after hours; or portray inequality to incite discourse? Despite the robust expressiveness of the digital medium, cities are typically remediated as maps, urban experiences as starred ratings, places of consequence as push-pins.


For instance, crime maps fail to address the broader social issues that exist behind crimes or the legal procedures that are spurred by police reports. Tying these events to geographic locations also produces an interesting set of constraints. Cities, or parts of cities, are condemned by virtue of featuring more pushpins than other cities or districts.


The city “experience,” or life in the city, transcends the constrained lexicon of way finding and casual reviews. The existing means of digital city representation do not account for the social aspects of the metropolitan experience, the diversity of perspectives existing within the urban scene, or the quantifiable data that can positively affect urban change.


As a master’s project, I would like to employ the affordances of the digital medium to appropriately account for the complexity of metropolitan existence. Ultimately, I would like to arrive at a robust, expressive and engaging digital image of the city. This image could consist of visualizations of data (quantitative or qualitative) and mappings of city spaces (real or imagined) furnished from the subjective perspectives of city residents.


Getting on with it…

As it stands this project exists only as many questions:

Should this take the form of an online social community? If so, what would be the available means of expression? What level of expressive constraint should be imposed?

–or–

Should this exist as an online digital artifact comprised of visualizations authored or chosen by me? Should there be a material correlative (i.e. a printed “map” of these materials)?

–or–

Should this be a digital “Urban Observatory” (as posited by Richard Wurman)? Could it blend of the subjective social aspects of the city and urban utility (i.e. way finding, legislative information, demographic information, etc.)?

–or–

Should this be a narrative using existing means of city representation? For instance, could existing maps, data sets, photos, and reviews be juxtaposed with other media to make more meaningful expressions of the city and the city experience?


Challenges

The largest challenge: articulating this idea to the point that an identifiable “project” materializes. I could also cite technical limitations – like the ability to implement a fully functioning online social community or creating captivating, insightful visualizations – as significant challenges as well. A challenge too, would be defining or better understanding the conventions users have adopted, or invented, to engage their cities online.


The Goal

Ultimately, I’d like to put forth a new means of engaging cities that is both informative and expressive. Or to have as a goal a means of escaping – or enhancing – the way cities and their events are currently represented online.