What If... void spaces could be greened?

There's a vacant patch of ground near my office. It's not large, an interstitial point behind some offices and next to a a low-rise council block, the post-war kind balcony walkways to the flats. 8x8 metres, let's say, the kind of space that's too small to develop and not big enough to bother about.



Instead, What If projects, an urban sustainability architecture practice, have got 70 half-tonne bags of soil and turned it into an allotment space for the local community. They say it's made the place "a beautiful oasis of green" - green yes, urban oasis yes, beautiful not so sure the plastic bags of soil are really that aesthetically appealing - even if they were commissioned to install the same thing for the opening of the Louis Vuitton store in Westfield shopping centre, see photo below. The latter being such a strange juxtaposition makes somehow the soil bags more appealing - they may be ugly but curation by Jeremy Deller, Turner Prize Winner 2004, makes them art? No, that's too hierarchical an attitude to take - but there's still a joy to be found in this disruption of pristine designer commercial space, even if the fact that it's there at the invitation of the shop itself makes it hardly radical.



This space is distinguished from a void by its big enigmatic white sign, showing only the OS grid reference, an arrow, and their web address. What If call this space Vacant Lot, and they've got more grow bags on another stretch of Chart Street, plus Plant Room on neighbouring East Road and a dozen more projects.



They then do more theoretical work, such as Modesty Screened, looking at temporary inhabitable environments formed without formal architectural intervention. Again, their examples are super-local to me - e.g. the garden centre on Caledonian Road. They write:

PROPOSAL
In UK cities approx. 70% of urban space is residential and planning authorities positively encourage residential-use over other activities. By taking advantage of the slowness of the planning process, areas of the city (i.e. unused sites, disused infrastructure, empty parking garages) could be used temporarily in this way.

This model can be developed in two directions:

1. On a strategic level to encourage the temporary use of existing `unused‘ sites within cities. Activities within these sites can expand to encourage other uses for example: urban agriculture, educational facilities, office / workshop space, arts and entertainment, residential, etc.

2. At a programmatic scale this model can be developed to see how it could influence the spatial and programmatic design of new mixed-use urban developments.

More about this to follow, I hope - I'm really excited by it both theoretically and because, well, I too am an urban dweller without a garden, and I'd love a chance to get my hands dirty with such a practical activism/intervention.

Learning to cycle / re-learning the City

I bought a bike this afternoon, the process having to be facilitated by a couple of mgs of valium because something about starting cycling in this City scares me that much. This makes it interesting; makes it something important to face up to and do.

Just the ride home from the bike shop opened up so many ideas - cycling will rewrite my urban experience. A few preliminary thoughts:

1. You go so fast. Three or four times as fast my usual walked 4mph and shit, I'm not used thinking at such speeds. Decision-making, navigating, keeping my eyes on everything I need to notice (cars traffic lights parked cars pedestrians holes in the road where the fuck i am) - this must be the source of my fear: the threat of overload in such a dangerous environment. Galloping on a horse - similar speeds, similar lack of crash protection - was at first frightening too; then it just became exhilarating. But there you've got the horse thinking about how to keep you out of trouble too - so perhaps my problems would be solved by a conscious (furry) bicycle?

2. You go so fast. This is going to make the City really small. I got back from Chalk Farm in what felt like 10 minutes, though it must have been longer - the concentration required puts you into a flow state where time is irrelevant. Yet that journey takes a good 45 minutes by bus, being an across-town orbital that doesn't mesh well with a largely radial system of bus routes. So now, fuck, is Chalk Farm close? Easy visits to my friend in Primrose Hill, Marine Ices, and that lovely vegetarian hippy cafe that kept feeding me free food? I'm going to be able to get to hitherto unknown places like Deptford, and the Lea Valley, and - fuck! - maybe the west. Correction: this is going to make my currently-frequented City really small, and enormously expand my perceptions of what's there and what's possible. Life beyond Zone 2 awaits.

3. This is going to require a phenomenal amount of navigational ability. I can usually look at a map once and memorise the route I need to walk - my recall of scale & direction & road names is good enough to absorb a mile or two's data in one go. But, going faster, a bicycle covers so many more streets. Futhermore, in the interests of not getting squashed I might like to stay off main roads where possible, requiring an even greater demand to remember labyrinthine back routes. Suddenly the Knowledge of this town's taxi drivers becomes something I too need to gain.

4. Cycling is also daunting because I apparently don't believe cars have people in - human-shaped amoral vegetables maybe, but not thinking caring people. Pedestrian life seems to have left me with the impression that it's my job to get out of their way, with no expectations that traffic will reciprocally try to avoid me. (After all, they're not going to be damaged by any close encounter.) So I carry this perception through to cycling, even though I am now a road user who should be a car's equal, someone to slow for and permit to turn and acknowledge right of way. I don't seem to understand that I am an equal, and cars should/will do these things for me; has pedestrianism left me with an inferiority complex? That says something about the hierarchical way in which our cities are currently designed/built - and perhaps makes a strong case in favour of those pavement-lowering, sign-removing, shared space reforms recently introduced along such roads as Kensington High Street.

Ornamented spaces

Jewellery students had taken over this disused shop on Camden High Street to show some of their degree work, these fascinating fabric-wrapped constructions and organic clustered shapes. We stepped downstairs to find, suddenly, the same forms garlanding the basement as used for the necklaces on dispay above -- oh the striking equivalency this suggests between rooms and bodies: they are both containers we inhabit, the spaces in and through which we live.

URBAN SURVIVAL! With Bear Grylls!!

The City is full of hazards. To keep you safe, here are some words of wisdom from macho SAS adventure man Bear Grylls (feel the testosterone fumes coming off his mere name) that I ripped out of a freebie paper [pdf version here]:


Bear, we're walking down Oxford Street on our way to buy some new pants when a giant savage poodle tries to maul us to death. What should we do to survive?

"I was always told in my army days just to whip your shirt off, wrap it round your arm to protect it, offer it that, let it go for it and then jam your fingers together straight into both eyes. Then squeeze together into its brain, hold it there, and it will release you and die. You're safe."

We're ice skating on the frozen Serpentine and then - crack! - the ice breaks and we plunge into the freezing water. We don't want to die wearing ice skates, so what should we do?

"The first thiing is don't panic. You can die from the gasp reflex when the shock makes you breathe water into your lungs, so you need to control your panic. Turn around and look at where you fell in - you know the ice is good to get out from. Break the ice, then ease your weight up and wriggle like a seal, kicking hard and spreading your weight. When you get out you need to get warm, so take your clothes off and start doing press-ups."

We're on the London Eye and it's really hot - bloody global warming - but it gets stuck, the sun is baking through the capsule and the air conditioning is screwed. How do we stay cool?

"Have you got a window in there? ['Not sure,' we say.] Well, that's very hard. Dehydration is a real killer. I've been in deserts where it's so hot they say that, if you don't have any water or survival skills, you're dead in three hours. Smash a window, get a bit of airflow through and, if nobody is ever going to get you, you're going to have to climb down. I've often thought about climbing the London Eye. I've examined it - it looks quite straightforward."


Now there's a challenge for the City Project to live up to this weekend!

The High Line park, NYC

City Project is just back from another great city: New York. The High Line park was opened in June, a much-publicised urban oasis on the site of a former rail line running up the West side from Gansevoort St to 20th. The regeneration had been kickstarted by the 2000 photoseries from Joel Sternfeld, showing the park abandoned, recolonised by nature, a beguiling secret space raised up above the city's awareness. It was beautiful. Now, designed within an inch of its life by James Corner Field operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, could the High Line retain any of this magic? My lover was not sure, and wrote to me about this... Then I went to see for myself.

He wrote:

I've just been up to the old elevated train line that was converted into a park. Near sunset, a rosy evening, lots of people on the streets, drifting out of gallery openings between 20th and 25th.

A park like that could have been a wild place, stolen from the city, but it was as sterile as an architect's drawing. Signs said "Keep it wild, keep to the path" - as if you can call anything wild when it grows in a sprinkler-irrigated patch of gravel that's not so much cultivated as curated.

At one point along the path the viaduct crossed the corner of a low building's roof. Broken chairs, old TV sets, statues with their heads replaced, hand-painted signs, hinted that the roof had once been a gateway to this place - what was now a public park had been someone's secret playground. I'm not sure the city's richer for the change.

Even landscape architects couldn't rob the place of all its character, though. There were views over the glass and steel of Chelsea, but more impressive were the points where the path passed through or under buildings. There was one that I found particularly striking - a high modernist grid of green glass and grey tiles, perched on tapering legs. As you know I'm not a fan of the international style, but there was something about the evening light on that smooth green surface that I found oddly moving. It seemed to call back half-formed memories from my early childhood - the wind on the sea, and something else I couldn't bring to the surface. On the way back to the subway all the greens and turquoises were peculiarly vivid. I bought a notebook to write this down for you before it faded.

You should go there when you're over, one early evening when the galleries are open - maybe write about it for the City Project.



My response:

I liked it. I'm not sure I have a defensible reason for liking the park as a concept, but certainly the planting was excellent. Fashionably loose, dominated by grasses and big drifts of colour without structure - all annuals that will die down in the winter, no shrubs - it reminded me strongly of another Chelsea: the Chelsea Flower Show, highlight of the British garden design calendar. The late summer prairie planting contrasted against the austere running lines of the concrete pathway and slick benches; the ecological design selecting the silver foliage and meadow plants that can handle the exposure and shallow soil and extremes of climate; the repetition of design elements and a limited number of different plant types - this is all very now, very chic. It's innovative to see this style escape the private garden for the public park, a space so long the domain of regemented beds of pansies and busy lizzies.

Its naturalness is to be sure a faux-naturalness, an aesthetic covertly overtly created - but the idea of the secret derelict nature reserve that was there before is surely too fantastical to be true (I never saw it, did you?) so what else can the High Line be now but fictive? The concept of a park on stilts, while a happy (hard-fought-for) accident, seems more like a borrowing from the Far East - Hong Kong, or Tokyo, where you don't walk consistently at ground level anywhere. It is designed for such an international audience (perhaps urban studies-educated visitors such as myself most of all!) rather than the utility of any local residents - park utility as in such civil functions as public gathering, grass and trees for those without gardens, space jogging and team sports and whiling away afternoons. No: instead it is surely a space in which to promenade one's small overpampered lapdog to attract another lapdog/metropolitan owner combo of appropriate sexuality; a purpose-designed space for showing off and dating? How utterly NY!

Of course, it's not exactly a free public space or much of an opening for civil society. Has any park been such since the cruisers were kicked out of Russell Square and Tessa Jowell tried to deny Hyde Park to the war marchers? The normative nature of parkspace (no camping no barbeques no music get your public assembly licenced plz) is just a little more visible on the High Line, its very shape in its elongation forbidding any crowd gathering, its entrances so easily sealed off. Perhaps the private garden style design is telling here. This loose, natural planting is meticulously tended by gardeners wearing chic pastiche Chinese peasant hats as they labour on their knees in the relentless unshaded sunshine. It's very picturesque, even labour becoming an elegant spectacle. Do you think they have health insurance?

The High Line is absolutely a bastardisation of what was there before - but the whole of Chelsea is the self-same thing, a district playing at very high-end faux dilapidation with its warehouse art galleries and stripped-down designer clothes stores; it has got the park it deserves and maybe that is excellent site-appropriate design. We're in the wrong part of town to design a park for the poor, darling.

An ambiguous defence, I know. I instinctually liked it, and yet it is unquestionably a problematic space. But oh, such dilemmas are the meat of urban experience...

Peckham library (Will Alsop, 2000)

I stumbled across Peckham Library quite unexpectedly the other day. It won the Stirling prize in 2000, and high words are said about its social responsibility - thus an appropriate find when I was in the neighbourhood to explore a charity's work with the socially excluded. But does the building work, does it really change anything? I was unsure.

Undoubtedly it's interesting to look at, and for architecture (a discipline that does not convince me with its political convictions) this might be everything - instead of a mere fragment of the building's impact, a fraction of its function as an assemblage of space-movement-people-meaning in a specific socio-economic context. Some authoritative voice tells us that "Peckham Library is not an irreverent post-modern architectural joke. It is a very serious building with a strong social mission" - and then indicates that said social mission goes as far as some nice but hardly revolutionary sustainable cooling measures. Woo. Critical urban theory has apparently not made enough an impact on designers yet, even though they can buy the latest City journal on this very topic in Borders no fancy academic subscription required.

But despite my scepticism, some of Peckham Library's social misssion seems to be working. It's shown in the increased visits to the library, and Alsop's 'civism'

"where civic space is defined as a place where you can meet someone outside, name the place and know where to go"

would indeed seem to be boosted in Peckham: this is a memorable place, it puts Peckham on the map for the right reasons rather than shootings, and there is indeed outdoor seating for meeting people. Nonetheless, nine years on the public square is a little run down, weeds colonising the paving, repairs needed and not forthcoming. The regeneration the library was supposed to herald does not seem to have arrived - perhaps there have been repairs, but no change of mood, no boost in image - and the locality remains very isolated: even the buses take convoluted routes to get there. The highstreet was covered in litter; so much for reputed Anthony Gormley street art.

This regeneration has entailed £275m in investment; 2500 new homes; a £5m new library (which admittedly Gordon the postman thinks is "beautiful"). But if you want to put an end to the ghetto then stop locking the gates at night - this is what's wrong with many smaller-scale housing projects too: impeding porous movement between neighbouring areas creates a them/us mentality and stops deprived areas integrating into wider society. Peckham needs a tube station and the access to the wider London jobs market that would facilitate; without this the gates are locked and the whole neighbourhood is socially excluded. However lovely the access to knowledge it may promise, a pretty green library is fairly cosmetic.

Cities & Citizenship: a New Urban Agenda debate

An interesting upcoming event from the London Development Agency's New Urban Agenda on the intersection of urban life, urban design, and citizenship:

* What does it mean to be a citizen in the 21st century?
* What is the relationship between the way we design our city and our perception and experience of citizenship?
* Is it time to redefine Londoners' obligations, responsibilities and rights to improve the liveability of our city?
* Are we equipped to tackle the environmental and economic challenges we face?

These questions and more will be tackled in a debate on Cities and Citizenship which kicks off the LDA’s New Urban Agenda Debates. Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the RSA will be in conversation with leading social entrepreneur Lord Mawson and pioneering writer and journalist Anna Minton, chaired by Ricky Burdett, Director of the Urban Age programme at the LSE.

The event will take place at 18:30 on Monday 21 September in the Great Room at the RSA, as part of the London Design Festival

Two sides of sex in the city

Two excellent reasons to use my 'sex and the city' tag, and a demonstration of two of its extremes.



Who can say what kind of love is inscribed on this tree - an 'I love you' for someone particular; an injunction to all of us, the public, to love more; an expression of a wider love for the city or indeed for trees? I love how scrawled it is, and that it's not a pristine stencil - whatever kind of love it feels passionate. And then a wingéd phallus, erect and exhibitionist yet just silly enough with its little feathers that I find it cheeky rather than aggressively cocky. A comment perhaps on the wilful independence of sexual desire, lust flying free of any conscious intent.



Behind both, though, the same kind of libidinal urban energy - a statement, "I DESIRE". A Deleuzian desire, not one built out of Lacanian lack but rather a force, a drive.

The places regeneration leaves behind

Just an ordinary North London road, scruffy and shabby with newsagents and kebab shops. When I moved to the City I didn't like these places, so different to the pristine market town where I grew up. But it's home now.

Even before 2008 many shopfronts were battened down or whitewashed over: longer-term shifts in economic geography than recession drove businesses out. Flats on this road are starting to be visibly gentrified - I live in one such block and there's a decent (clearly architect-driven) refurb just round the corner. But there is little demand for business here any more, only corner shop chicken shop pizza place. The odd laundrette; still internet cafes, a reminder that the internet is not exactly the great leveller; many are still economically or culturally excluded. Little more. These are some of the shops shuttered and left behind:



Blackalls Fruiterers and Greengrocers, established over 100 years. Closed now, closed at least fifteen years if its phone number began not 0207 or 0171 but 071. And the tenant just pulled the shutters down and left - the landlord has not re-let the space, has not converted into a fried chicken emporium or poundstore or fought the council for reclassification as in-demand residential. Just left.



W. Plumb the butcher has a beautiful old-fashioned sign with even a little stained glass. Where did he go? How did he feel about closing the business, about giving up hope of becoming W. Plumb & Sons, or perhaps Daughters? I cannot imagine this road with a proper old-fashioned independent butcher on it - what was it like, did it have community that extended beyond council estate dwellers? (Do they still have community, or do I romanticise? I know we middle classes have lost it.) This has always been a working class area, my block of flats one of the few visible signs of gentrification - but for it now to have a proper family butchers like this would be such a posh thing: how Highgate, how Crouch End.



Perhaps a more recent casualty - or not: Sega's Dreamcast (2001) was a failure, and the Saturn (1995) not much better, so would this branding date back to Megadrive days (1991)? I spoke to the chap in North London Models - not a brothel, a model aircraft & toy car shop, a relic still going on no visible sales at all - who dated the loss of these shops to the early Nineties and, presumably, the recession then. Further down the road there was even a bank, the Natwest form now sitting above somebody's kitchen still visible under layers of paint. Was this area once a highstreet, a community, a functioning economy? A destination? Now it is just a road for transit through to other places.

On yer bike: adventures in new urban space

So I'm finally getting a bike. Finally listened to my road-bike warrior friends on the poetry of motion; finally accepted that it has to be the best way of getting around this tangled City. (Pretty good, too, to save some cash: life in this town eats money.) And suddenly I find myself moving in a whole new environment, find a whole new City opens up to me - a new city built from the same streets I've walked for years. What a tool the bicycle can be for urban perception! Let me explain:

You go fast on a bicyle. Having not cycled since I was 10, I had forgotten this. The same familiar journey becomes a completely different journey at four times the speed (say 4mph walking, 16mph cycling) - instead of taking an opportunity to think, one must be constantly aware of traffic, road conditions, your balance - and all these thiings change, every second. Architecture no longer matters, the dress sense of pedestrians (such an urban pleasure!) becomes inconsequential; the landscape becomes one of road signs, traffic lights, moving cars and parked cars and tarmac texture. Now you can see the grooves buses wear into the street surface; painted road markings are no longer signs & symbols but objects, raised up and tactile. This road-space is governed by rules I do not know; I read the Highway Code so I would not be a total liability out bike-testing, but this is such little fraction of the behavioural codes of roadusers. Cycling ignorant of this is cycling illiterate, a foreigner in a strange land.

Yet what is so intriguing is that these new processes and foreign meaning is re/inscribed upon streets I've walked and bussed down for years. As a pedestrian I handle traffic so fluently, jaywalking across roads watching traffic flow as a set of (differential?) equations, each lane to be solved one at a time. I weave in and out of cars without concern, guided more by instinct than concrete thought as to what is safe. Yet up on a bike it feels like a completely different problem. Instead of crossing perpendicular to traffic I must now move parallel with it - become part of it, I suppose, though my thinking has not yet quite understood that concept so far. This layering of spaces, of meanings within the same built architecture - it is the city as palimpsest, the overlayering of trace upon trace upon trace.

Cycling produces a new emotional geography too. I don't want to be ashamed to admit that testing bikes yesterday I was afraid - so easy to wobble into traffic, or, not knowing what to look for in this unfamiliar setting, to fail to notice impending danger. Cars are so much bigger, heavier, armour-plated - when cycling they felt like autonomous machines, their trajectories inevitable and unalterable. I'd forget there were people inside, people who were watching and thinking about how I was moving - people who would make an effort to avoid hitting me. Is this why cyclists talk of the road as warfare? It is hard to see it as teamwork, much as it may be that kind of social space of cooperation and allowance too. So cycling was this state of continual awareness of how I might come to harm - can I call this existential? - very liminal, danger a knife-edge away. Like standing on the edge of a tall building - and, what is more, knowing how easy a moment of madness could be.

I beg to know when cycling might become second nature; how long does it take to learn to read the road? I hate to be a beginner like this, a liability to myself and others. Though it'd be a shame to lose this novel frame of perception - must mine it for ideas while I can! - it is so difficult to inhabit this road-space of fear and trial and threat. Yet until I started thinking of buying a bike I did not know this arena of challenges was even there - hidden in plain sight, the materiality of the road users visible but the process and meaning obscure without practical experience. And now these streets become a place for me to test myself, to face my fears, and to develop this new competency and embodiment.

If, that is, I can find the right bike!

Hoxton stencillist wisdom, Jan 2009

DON'T WRITE ON WALLS, WRITE EVERYWHERE - now there's a message for a cities blogger. The first part of that instruction is to be ignored, of course, if your glyph has the graphic purity of the tag below.

Geographic Information... Postcards?

The Met Police's latest resident engagement exercise: "tell us your concerns about crime and antisocial behaviour in this area", and mark where it's happening on the map.

Quite touching, really. It's the police reaching out rather than being merely reactive, and in allowing written and spatial feedback it's open to different styles of communication and thinking. The tagline is "Listening to you" - god, you think they're going to give you a hug rather than (a) catch criminals and (b) beat up/imprison/murder lawful protestors.

But it's not going to work very well, is it? First, the map's half-unreadable because the boundaries of the local ward cutting off several key street names. Second, do respondents have the sophistication to put their X in the place they want to be describing? Sounds patronising, but the first rule of survey design is always Keep It Simple, Stupid: if it can be misunderstood it will. Third is the problem of processing all these smudged Freeposted postcards: that's a lot of data entry, and half of it won't be legible.

You can see what they're intending, and it's good: mapping crime, Geographic Information Systems, very closely related to work at UCL's Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. (Linked, even, c.f. former policeman Paul Richards' PhD on Realtime geodemographics for reassurance policing and crime prevention [ppt]. But if you want a GIS, don't hand out bloody postcards... E-democracy or e-governance has never quite taken off in this country, has it - why not? This should be web-based, it should connect to stuff, not least the Met's overall Crime Mapping site - yet there is nothing, no parallel site, no mention of it on www.met.police.uk/islington at all. Is this so hard? It wouldn't require groundbreaking innovation: internet use is widespread enough for e-governance; Google Maps is robust enough; and people can type more legibly than they handwrite on half-a-dozen narrow lines. And we've got an ex-copper doing a doctorate on this exact topic.

So why'd I get a damn postcard?

Capital markets - the economic realities of office space

Enough cultural whiff-whaff (as our Dear Leader Mr Johnson might say): the city's made of money. Made of capital, if you will. And I love money: I find it fascinating.

The Rat and Mouse is a key real estate economics blog, but its focus is largely residential property - as indeed is most newspaper coverage. Subprime residential mortgages in the US may have kickstarted the whole credit crunch - this was something I watched kick off from a ringside seat in real estate research; fascinating - but it is in fact commercial real estate that has seen the biggest falls. You thought 22% peak-to-current fall in house prices was bad? Try a 50% crash in office values.

Furthermore, whereas subprime mortgage securities may have been the catalyst of the crunch, it is commercial property that yet remains to kick the banks in the teeth. They lent too much against this sector, and have not yet written down these loans and deleveraged these securities. Savills say almost all property investment loans made between 2004 and 2007 are now in negative equity, yet banks are extending loans rather than crystallise their losses. The last couple of weeks have seen green shoots emerging in the economy much earlier than anyone really expected - Darling may have been mocked for his Budget, but now Q3 growth looks a real likelihood. Yet with these lending problems ahead, do you really want to bet against a W-shaped double dip coming up after Christmas?

What I haven't seen is much discussion of what this implies for the urban fabric. With companies cutting back on staff and the near-cessation of merger & acquisition activity, demand for office rentals is down as companies aren't needing to trade up to larger spaces. (The falling rents drive part of this 50% collapse in values discussed above: commercial property is an investment class so its value is based on its yield.) Increases in availability and affordability combined with the current mood of caution may mean that demand will hold up best in traditional centres: City, West End and a bit of Holborn. Your Victoria, Paddington and Kings Cross developments? Aren't going to get the big tenants they'd counted on, and new developments are visibly being put on hold as they fail to be pre-let before completion. Additionally with prime office space more accessible, demand for shabbier secondary offices will surely decrease. If summer is as hot as forecast, how much tolerance will there be for poor or no air conditioning? There's a lot of 1960s and 70s space that, at least superficially, looks to be beyond refurb. Yet demolition costs money, and there's little pressure for new development sites yet.



City Project says it'll be a prime summer for exploring abandoned buildings...

Holloway, May 2009

Who knows what the story is here?

Sinclair (1997) 'Lights Out For The Territory': A review, or perhaps a mauling

So Iain Sinclair's Lights Out For The Territory is "Quite simply one of the finest books about London ever written", says the Spectator; "A book about London, in other words, a book about everything" (Peter Ackroyd in The Times).

Bollocks.

There are no people there, not in his writing. The city is empty, inhabited only by poets and booksellers: educated, broke but certainly not poor; white or maybe a bit Jewish, and monolithically middle aged and male. What ghost town is this? I wouldn't want to go there. Sinclair walks, he says, but his words are so terribly disembodied for such a project; there he goes, the anti-phenomenologist mimbling off into history, always the past, as though he hasn't found any there there at all. In seeing a palimpsest beneath the city, he loses sight of what's in front of his eyes; oh, Sinclair obsesses over graffito scrawls as though they are authorless, solipsistically taking them all as signs for him to read, to interpret. Hermetic fucking arcana - what about the unknown? What about the proposition that the city is chaotic, is vast, is unknowable? No, let's be afraid of that and search for Dan Brown hidden traces, let's go chasing castles in the sky, this airy semiotic fantasy and forget that the real links, the real connections - the real goddamn mystery - is in the people, the messy illiterate gorgeous mass of people from whom Mr Sinclair is running walking away.