I'm considering submitting an essay to a competition sponsored by Urban Omnibus. The essay is supposed to be about finding different ways to measure the value and impact of cities. I can't think of anything exciting or novel, but I do have the beginnings of a few ideas:
1. Potential Interactions: The sum of every person you are close enough to touch in the course of your day in the city. While this sounds creepy, and it's devilish to measure, it could serve as a comparison to the experiences of people in less populated areas who could go an entire week only being around a few dozen people.
2. Unrepeated or Rare Encounters: With either persons or places. This metric can only be described in terms of a probability--again, tricky to put a number to. I'll quote from John Prine on this one: "How the hell can a person go to work in the morning and get home in the evening and have nothing to say?" In a city, am I more likely to encounter someone I know, or don't know? The answer has to be yes.
3. Deviation from Routines: This touches on something that's been on my mind for quite a while. Every human settles into routines that are deeply reliable and predictable. A study done a few years ago that tracked cell-phone location usage in a European Country demonstrated that people adhere to the same patterns of movement over 90% of the time. While mobility is one of the distinguishing features of a free society, it is a right observed on special occasions. In a lower density settlement, deviations from routine might seem more common and more pronounced by virtue of the fact that stuff is always beyond walking distance. If I drive to the Wal-Mart to buy socks on a Sunday afternoon it represents more of a journey than if I walk over to Marshall's on my lunch break.
Maybe I'm going somewhere with this.
No comments:
Post a Comment