From the Open Space Archives is a thematic digest of content culled from the last five years of posts on Open Space.

“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only
because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

David Wojnarowicz, Untitled, 1988-1989

What makes a city a city? Does the city have a voice, and, if so, does it speak to us? How do we experience the city? Through representation and memory, the city becomes conceptual, relatable, practical, and questionable. Today, a few posts exploring facets of urban existence:

• I live in Foster City. I live here because it is convenient, not because (or so I had thought until that moment) it is a remarkable place. Lindsey Westbrook on, well, Foster City –>  http://blog.sfmoma.org/2010/10/lindsey-westbrook/

• According to the American Speaking Telephone Company’s 1878 list of subscribers, Chy Lung & Co, Chinese Mchts was located at 640 Sacramento Street at Montgomery Street, just a block from the building I would call home over a century later.  Matthew Harrison Tedford on Carleton Watkins –> http://blog.sfmoma.org/2013/03/tedford-on-watkins/

• When does a single city contain elements of activity that feel both center AND periphery? Slought’s “Reimagining the Civic” –>  http://blog.sfmoma.org/2012/11/slought/

• When one takes a photograph in 2009 to show a woman returning from a night out in a city when the principle victims of feminicidio are precisely women of this age and generally of this social class…one cannot take up a neutral position or pretend innocence of the situation of feminicidio… Fernando Fuentes’s “Suburbia” –> http://blog.sfmoma.org/2012/06/suburbia/

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