I'm always a fan of wandering around Providence. I've done some traveling and it makes me want to explore the place I'm living in more and to help cultivate that sense of constant awareness that's somewhat hard to maintain when being in the same place for a few years.
I also like thinking about the ideas going into creating and designing a city and manipulating the spacial environments people inhabit as they move through their daily lives. I was reading a RISD thesis about the nature of waiting, like for the bus for example. It said how benches were a sort of offering of comfort by the city to people waiting. This made me think in general about the type of other offerings the city gives, and the unintentional offerings that it may provide (like nooks people hang out smoking cigarettes in, or areas where homeless people sleep). I want to try other methods of consciously exploring and to broaden the way I move through Brown campus and around Prov.
The most interesting part was finding the little living spaces with decayed bedframes, bottles, and clothing lying around and how these areas were created by the arrangement of various accumulated items. There was a blue tarp thrown over a branch that looked like a teepee that was my favorite part. How one creates a home in the public or overlooked spaces of a city, especially with items that are probably not picked out from a store but acquired with some difficulty or from the trash, is fascinating to me.
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