41–50 of 130 posts
Debord defines the dérive as "a mode of experimental behaviour linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances." It is an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, in which participants drop their everyday relations and "let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there".
This is probably one of my favorite activities in foreign cities - walk or take public transportation aimlessly for a few hours. Buy a snack that catches my eye, or find a cafe or pub to linger at long enough to see the ebb and flow of foot traffic. Directed tourism is fine, but seeing a few randomly sampled slices of a culture and place gives the experience 'roots' for me in some intangible way.
Great idea... in a safe city
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dérive Debord defines the dérive as "a mode of experimental behaviour linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances." It is an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, in which participants drop their everyday relations and "let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there".
I also enjoyed Randonautica when it first came out but it has gone through a number of transformations that make it more game-y than explore-y.
This is probably one of my favorite activities in foreign cities - walk or take public transportation aimlessly for a few hours. Buy a snack that catches my eye, or find a cafe or pub to linger at long enough to see the ebb and flow of foot traffic. Directed tourism is fine, but seeing a few randomly sampled slices of a culture and place gives the experience 'roots' for me in some intangible way.
Great idea... in a safe city
Nice neighborhoods are nice to walk around.
Sure some cities are complete cesspools that shouldn't be walked around at all, but in general people aren't going to walk around those cities, so mentioning that doesn't add much to the conversation.
COWEN: Next question from the iPad: “When you arrive into a city you’ve never been to, what and how do you prioritize what to see?”
BERTAUD: Before Google Earth, I will just walk randomly through the city and usually start from the center, and to have a cross-section toward the suburbs. I will just walk for hours. Just as my father recommended, look with the idea that nothing in this city is random.
If you see a barbershop at the corner, it’s because the owner of the barber shop found that it was the best place for his business to be there. If you see a tall building next to a short building, it has a reason, too. You have to try to understand why it is there. Do not think . . .
One word I hate that the World Bank use all the time in a report is, urbanization is “haphazard.” There is no such thing. Urbanization is done by people, and they have a very, very good reason for doing it. Sometime distorted by regulation or something like that, that’s true — discrimination — but you have to understand why the city’s it.
After Google Earth, then it’s very different because now, I look at an image of Google Earth, and I select some neighborhoods in AdSense (sic) that I want to visit, which intrigue me. Why are they that way? This seems particularly dense or not dense at all. So rather than going at random, I will select the places based on my interpretation of Google Earth.
[1] https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/alain-bertaud/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great idea... in a safe city
I remember such a stroll Eddy St. in the Tenderloin one fine midnight. No muggings, but a number of fellow citizens were very curious about whether I would like to buy stuff from them.
even in the rare occasion of some type of confrontation, most people want to resolve it without violence, and certainly not death. people have varying strategies for such confrontations--congeniality, causticity, evasiveness, etc.--and it's worth developing yours through practice, rather than living in fear. as alluded, most of the sketchy characters in the tenderloin are druggies, not thugs, and really don't care about you at all.
This is probably one of my favorite activities in foreign cities - walk or take public transportation aimlessly for a few hours. Buy a snack that catches my eye, or find a cafe or pub to linger at long enough to see the ebb and flow of foot traffic. Directed tourism is fine, but seeing a few randomly sampled slices of a culture and place gives the experience 'roots' for me in some intangible way.
Great idea... in a safe city
This is probably one of my favorite activities in foreign cities - walk or take public transportation aimlessly for a few hours. Buy a snack that catches my eye, or find a cafe or pub to linger at long enough to see the ebb and flow of foot traffic. Directed tourism is fine, but seeing a few randomly sampled slices of a culture and place gives the experience 'roots' for me in some intangible way.
Great idea... in a safe city