Inspiration from How Cities and Regions Can Be Approached

It is this grip of exhilaration that writing on wonders and plights of city life throw me into that I want to elaborate on. Cities are important. No question about that. Parts of them are durable. Parts are ephemeral. However, it is this collective and individually shared intention to write about them that captivates me. Cities interpellate us. Cities challenge preconceived perceptions. Passions burst around some of them. Sleepy downtowns define others. One can go the range of theoretical vocabulary and methodological approaches in trying to approach what cities are. However, it is a way of writing about them that is vernacular and informed alike that shows the way towards the freedom with which one can approach cities in their multiple aspects. One aspect at a time, it becomes possible not so much to connect the dots around the issues that makes cities up but to get an expanded vision of what a single point of departure towards understanding of cities might be. If there is a methodology it seems to be ethnography that goes global. It is somewhere on the interface between the global and the local that the essence of what makes cities different from other terms of spatial reference seems to lie.