🧭 🏙️ Navigating the digital landscape of a real city

The concept of “locality” started collapsing online slowly at first, then suddenly. Local places were first migrated online quite literally by companies like Yelp, Foursquare, and NextDoor. The crowdsourced reviews and ranking system transformed the relationship between people and places. Nextdoor magnifies the stark reality of American neighborhoo... See more

We’ve lost gradients of intimacy, a concept from architecture, the ability to loiter and meander through a space, engaging when we want in varying levels of expression. We don’t have any peripheral vision on the internet. We have to be in one place or the other. Simultaneously, we’re never really in any place—we can always blame connection issues a... See more

Examples like Community Memory and BEV captured an optimistic vision of how computers and networks can assist in “placemaking”: the open, participatory process of shaping a physical space through the dreams and histories of the people who live there. In these early infrastructures, every graze with the machine reinforced the importance of the peopl... See more

Social media, mainstream news, and an explosion of Substack newsletters often painted pictures of cities quelled and hibernating, in some ways diminished, and of urbanites either turned inward toward self-betterment, or outward, toward their local communities or country homes.