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.