CITY X

A GHOSTLAND BOOK

The modernists rebelled against the“mess” of the city. They put everythingin their place. In this square shall bethe houses. In that square the offices.In that square the stores. In some formor another, this system, called zoning,is in force over 99% of the Americancontinent. Its main advantage is that itis incredibly lazy.

For more than half a century, the in-between, what is not really a house,a shop or an office, has had no place.The “boomtowns” of today are endlessgrids of single-purpose zones.

A city is not reducible to parts. A cityis a mesh of relationships betweenspaces. It begins once a space isbuilt to provide a specialized functionthat is not fulfilled by another existingspace, and the two spaces are linkedtogether by a communication system.Let’s call this first space a and thenew space b. Once a and b form relationship a–b, the city X is born. Xis a set which contains relationships.

The mathematical definition of a city [extract]

Mathieu Helie

@http://emergenturbanism.com

THE CATALOGUE OF FORMSIS ENDLESS: UNTIL EVERYSHAPE HAS FOUND ITS CITY,NEW CITIES WILL CONTINUETO BE BORN. WHEN THEFORMS EXHAUST THEIRVARIETY AND COME APART,THE END OF CITIES BEGINS.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

All great art is

born of the metropolis.Ezra Pound

The city, however, does not tell its past, butcontains it like the lines of a hand, written inthe corners of the streets, the gratings of thewindows, the banisters of the steps, the

antennae of the lightning rods, the poles ofthe flags, every segment marked in turn withscratches, indentations, scrolls.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

The life of our city is rich in poetic and marveloussubjects. We are envelopedand steeped as though inan atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do notnotice it.

Charles Baudelaire

ONCE I WAS IN THE CITY,

I REALLY ENJOYED IT.

JUST TO EXPERIENCE

THINGS. THERE WAS SO

MUCH NEW STUFF.

MADELEINE PEYROUX

American cities are like badger holes, ringed

with trash – all of them – surrounded by piles of

wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost

smothered in rubbish. Everything we use comes

in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging

we love so much. The mountain of things

we throw away are much greater than

the things we use.

John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

provides what otherwise could be givenonly by travelling;

namely, the

metropolisBy its nature, the

strange.Jane Jacobs, The Death andLife of Great American Cities

Cities, like dreams, are made ofdesires and fears, even if the threadof their discourse is secret, theirrules are absurd, their perspectivesdeceitful, and everything concealssomething else. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

In all these sights I achieve solace only in bringing forth trees,

picturing them blooming like smoke

from the roofs of gutted buildings,

dreaming of what a

fine and

picturesque pile of rubble

this city will someday make.

Tod Wodicka, All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall Be Well: A Novel

FOR THOSE WHO ARE LOST, THERE WILL ALWAYS BE CITIES THAT FEEL LIKE

Simon Van Booy, Everything Beautiful Began After

HOME.

When you take a flower inyour hand and really look at it,it’s your world for the moment.I want to give that world tosomeone else. Most people inthe city rush around so, theyhave no time to look at aflower. I want them to see itwhether they want to or not.

Georgia O’Keeffe

WHAT STRANGE PHENOMENA WEFIND IN A GREAT CITY, ALL WE NEEDDO IS STROLL ABOUT WITH OUREYES OPEN. LIFE SWARMS WITHINNOCENT MONSTERS.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Men living in the most densely populatedareas of Sweden, for instance, are at a

68 percent higher risk of beingadmitted for psychosis – often the firstsign of schizophrenia – than those wholive in the countryside. For women therisk is 77 percent higher. Somethingabout city living seems to spark theharrowing delusions, hallucinations,and disorganized thinkingcharacteristic of a schizophrenic break.

Ethan Watters, Crazy Like Us

It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at oncesolid and liquid, at once air and stone. Erica Jong

SPEND TWENTY YEARS THERE ANDYOU ASK YOURSELF HOW THERECAN STILL BE STRANGERS WITHSO MANY FAMILIAR FACES ... IT’SPROBABLY THAT CITIES GENERATESTRANGERS CONTINUOUSLY ...FREDERIK PEETERS, BLUE PILLS: A POSITIVE LOVE STORY

To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is tolook at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.Frank Lloyd Wright

Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary ofart, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship betweenman and material that exists in the continual creative playof urban living. The city as we imagine it, then,soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is asreal, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locateon maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.Jonathan Raban

City life is millions of peoplebeing lonesometogether.Henry David Thoreau

CITY X

© ghostland 2012

This book was produced for the SoFoBoMo project 2012.

All photographs were taken between 28 July and

18 August 2012.

I used a Canon 400D with standard 18–55mm kit lens

and 70–300mm lens.

RAW images were processed using Canon’s Digital

Photo Professional. Jpegs were tweaked in Photoshop.

Locations

Kew Gardens, Richmond

Reading Town Centre

South Hill Park, Bracknell

Swinley Forest, Bracknell

The Book

Set in Univers and NeoPangaia

Constructed in QuarkXPress

[Comments invited] ghostland@talktalk.net