GPS Drawing

We drove through every drive-thru on North Ave, from the intersection on North and Oakland to North and 67th. This is what we ate, so what?

Micro/Macro

Pictured on the top is a view of Kilbourn Avenue where it intersects with Cass street and Marshall street. While walking past this area, I was confused by the median of the street, which seems to be making an attempt to be a park. There are areas with benches, flowers, mature trees, sculptures, and spacious runs of grass. This obviously presents a clash in functionality as Kilbourn Avenue is a place of transience and a park is one of leisure.

Pictured on the bottom is the result of my questioning of this space. I questioned what activities happen in parks that are not present at this site. Where I learned that the space is utilized in some way, it became apparent to me that people don't usually use this space as a space for leisurely activities. However, there are other places in Milwaukee that carry a reputation for being places of leisure. One of these places is Lake Park. Milwaukee is home to a prestigious invitation-only croquet club that often meets in Lake Park. Croquet is rooted in history as an activity for the upper class, as they had the luxury of time to spend on leisure. The members of the Milwaukee croquet club represent that image as they dress entirely in white to play croquet.

Personal/ Public

Reflecting on the topic of "public space" that has been discussed in class has forced me to look into myself and decide what I find to be the most meaningful characteristics of public space. I think a public space's ability to provide a platform for pedestrians to network and become connected with their surroundings (discussed in the Nato Thompson reading) resonates with me the most.

Additionally, I find it curious that while involved in a social network, public space can also offer moments of solitude. There is a park in southern Indiana that my family visits religiously every three years to celebrate our family reunion. The park is made up of over 400 acres of lakes and rivers, surrounded by lush pine forests, prairies, and meadows.

Through the park are narrow paved roads to guide visitors to the different locations of the park. (Pool, Horse barn, boat launches, tennis courts, camp sites, cabins, DNR office, etc.) During our stay in the park, I enjoy riding my bicycle around the park on these roads. While it used to be a sublime experience for me as a child, I grew to become very familiar with it with age. Now the roads and paths are predictable to me. I know where to speed up to gain momentum for a hill and where to expect dangerous curves. Along with the sense of orientation I've gained while navigating the park roads, I've acquired a favorite place. A part of the road that I travel separates two large lakes. During any time of the day there is a definite beauty in the openness of the space, but my favorite time to linger is after the sun has set and the stars have come out. Because this site is in the center of a huge forest with no light pollution and separating two lakes, there is an unbelievable visibility of the stars. Members of my family like to gather and lay in the road for hours to look at the stars, usually in silence punctuated by outbursts every few minutes when a shooting star passes.

My favorite part of this experience is how mischievous I feel by lying in the middle of the road. If I think deeper about this experience in relation to some of the class readings, I realize how peculiar, yet contrived, the experience really is. Star-gazing while laying on a paved road isn't a very common thing but the park roads were designed to make a platform for this experience, consciously or not. After all I would not have access to the site if it weren't paved, as there are probably thousands of intriguing nooks in the park that I am unaware of simply because I cannot access them.

This experience also exists simultaneously in my mind as a social experience in public, and a moment of solitude in nature. I find them to be inseparable experiences. This is because the point of attraction is nature, but it is also a spectacle. There is a collective pool for the broader experience of stargazing with family, but also an individual experience within that collective. This has always been the case for me at least. I always tend to tune out the people around me as I attempt to mentally place myself (the micro) in the universe (the macro). So I think that there is an undeniable power that nature has in reminding me that I am a single working mechanism of the entire universe, yet a connected part in the greater mechanism that is the universe.

Coordinates: 37 25.818 'N 122 05.36'W

3 Days 3 Ways

The three modes of transportation that I selected for re-experiencing the route taken from MIAD to the Holton St. Viaduct were walking, driving, and riding a razor scooter.

The sections of Nato Thompson’s article that resonated most with my experiences were the places where Thompson quotes, “Marx’s Phrase ‘Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves.” –Guy Debord and also the areas in which Thompson states that the whole idea of being a pedestrian in an urban space is predetermined.

Relating specifically to my experiences, I felt that I had the most say in what I wanted to think about or observe while walking through the city. I noticed that while driving especially, I was obligated to primarily observe the streets and other cars sharing the streets. There was also less freedom in the variety of choices I could make because of size reasons and obviously driving laws that are in place to ensure safety and order. It was also less easy to stop in my tracks to document a thought or image while driving for similar reasons.

At this point I find myself interested in what Thompson also says about walking being a part of the language within urban landscape. This shows up in the passage talking about Michel de Certeau’s book The Practice of Everyday Life. Thompson quotes, “ The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered.” The reading continues to say “The city could be considered a language: a place where a short-cut across a yard or jay- walking were moments of personal flair.”

I feel that these quotes go well with my feeling of personality and freedom while walking through the city over the other modes. Not to say that I don’t think there is a language in driving through a city, I would like to say, though that I think the difference may be equivalent to hand-writing a letter versus typing a letter on the computer. Typing on the computer provides a more uniform structure where hand-writing on paper grants one the freedom of meandering to a destination while making it more personable.