cluck cluck

a rare content moment. allow me to savour it...aaahhhhh.

no reason, really. just feel a tad peaceful, no prickly innner-non-peace. won't bother dissecting it today. actually, already have, while i was writing that. brain works amazingly fast in certain contexts. oh well.

inky directed me to a blog today - have linked it.

a friend sent me a wedding invite today. one of the few weddings i really would have liked attending. but it's millions of miles away, obviously, so no go. oh well

aaand it's back to reading what makes london such a unique business environment.... what does that have to with urban sociology, you ask? everything, apparently. am snooping out a conspiracy theory here. the city is being constructed by the developer. the government helps the developer make the city in a certain way to keep the market happy. so the city space represents the money in the city. it's fine if you are the sort who lives online, in virtual communities, plugged in 24/7, doing blogger meets indoors, in luxurious multinational coffee shop environments. but if you decide to engage with life around you, your real environment, if you take off the ipod for a bit, then a market-representing public space poses a bit of a problem.

cities have been read and written since they have been cities. every time someone tries to accord it a divine order, compare it to a diseased being or envisage it as a machine, the city becomes a text. everything is text actually, everything that we see and try to analyse; everytime we try to give order to something, organise it into frameworks, we make it a text.

trouble in the city's case is that everyone, quite rightly, wants the right to be a writer. if the right to write remains only with a visionary (politician, architect, planner), the city ceases to be about the people that inhabit it.

a people-representing public space would be one that people can appropriate, write in- and every kind of people, not just an elite depending on who owns the space.

so that was a hodge podge of my current urban concerns, a jumble of conversations and diagrams that i've been dabbling in. apologies to the originators of the ideas entangled here. there will be order, soon - but not much, for that would be too much writing.