I was in Philadelphia over the weekend visiting with my friend and former colleague Jasper Sluijs. It was an excellent opportunity to get away from things for a while, but, with Jasper's help, it was also an excellent opportunity to tease a hypothesis out of my concept.
Being from the DC-area I have a very strong mental image of what a city is, or should be, and living in the south (Austin, TX and then Atlanta, GA) has really challenged and expanded that image. I'm also a product of the Maryland suburbs and have, or had, an ingrained notion of what strip malls were: their basic function, appearance, etc.
So, sitting street-side in South Philadelphia, sipping on a Yuengling after a long walk around the city, Jasper and I started to talk about narrowing my focus for this project. Although it sounds like fun, it's simply not enough to cruise around and snap shots of strip malls and say: these are cultural centers with levels of expressiveness heretofore unexplored. That would be easy.
Together we surmised that this project needs a solid hypothesis and we started thinking about city codes and planning. And there's something in that: perhaps due to lack of, or overabundance of, city planning ordinance, strip malls have become cultural centers in Atlanta. This is a relationship that should be relatively easy to suss out. For instance, the coding that allows for an occult shop to operate on a block in South Philly would in Atlanta allow it to operate in a strip mall off of a highway.
Does city planning place constraints upon or facilitate cultural commerce? To take this a step further, I also plan to investigate how these constraints could be/should be represented in a digital environment. I am open to any suggestions that may help refine or refute this train of thought: so holla in the comments!
