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Spanning the Air Bridge to See Cities in Emergence
In European countries emerging from lockdown, life in quarantine has mostly passed. We have moved to lives in emergence, a daily diary of risk assessment, advisories, and air bridges. Overtourism, at least for now, has returned to mere tourism, spiced by sanitizer, HEPA filters, and masks.
Instagram and Facebook will likely slowly return to bucket list checking on display: a “ c’est Moi en Paris” for all to see. Such was pre-pandemic Instagram, documenting our “personal cities” became second nature. From 2015–2017, I offered Seeing the Better City as a deeper dive, beyond show-and-tell declarations, or repetitive illustrations of how the grass is always greener in cities and places where we aren’t now located or never will be. Thanks to coronavirus, its time to revisit those principles, 2020-style.
For some, personal, visual ethnographies were as simple as the ready use of a smartphone and social media sharing of one or more photographs to document daily urban life. Others ( c’est Moi encore), did so on regular walks, documenting potholes, land-use application notices, or various stages of new construction. Concerns about urban life also depended on more poignant events faraway, especially those that occur in iconic, international urban places central to the interpretation of city life and urbanism.
