Writing about cities

un espejo tan inmenso como la multitud; a un caleidoscopio dotado de consciencia, que, a cada uno de sus movimientos, repre -senta la vida múltiple y la gracia moviente de todos los elementos de la vida

It is the writer in dialogue with the city – its history, its art, its inhabitants, the ambient conflict in the streets. It is writing that is searching, that can hold space for ambivalence, and uncertainty.

Contempla los paisajes de la gran ciudad, paisajes de piedras acariciadas por la bruma o golpeadas por la violencia del sol. Disfruta de los bellos carruajes, de los fieros caballos, de la limpieza deslumbrante de los bo tones, de la destreza de los lacayos, de los andares de las mujeres ondu lantes, de

Some of the most compelling writing on travel and cities is not gesturing towards what to see but rather how to see - how to turn consciousness into context, meditation into meanin

But walking in a European city in a brown body feels audacious and the pleasure often conditional.

Skin too is a passport.

You walk into the folds of the city with a desire to roam, building a repository of memories that become cartographers over time.

o read Of Cities & Women is to wander through a city in search of an “open space, a privileged place where the free line of the horizon creates a pure pleasure.”

when you're often reminded that the country in which you live will never fully embrace you as its citizen, when your movement between frontiers has been conditional for most of your life, you develop an embodied understanding of how you occupy space in places and move with a unique sense of awareness and respect

The city in the waning of winter, the city on weeks where the sun doesn’t skip a day, the city on afternoons bathed in islands of buttermilk light, the city on the night the sky was a riotous pink, the city of Matisse and Chagall who captured its luminosity, the city of lengthening shadows that form filigrees, the city by the sea held in eternal bl... See more