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Mike Ritter's avatar

This topic could be covered so many ways, and you got to lots of them! A couple books / projects I like when I think about cities are Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, Cityscapes of Boston by Peter Vanderwarker and Robert Campbell, and the photographers Charles Marville followed decades later by Atget covering Paris' 19th to early 20th century transformations which then inspired Bernice Abbott to create changing New York in the 1930s. The list goes on and on. All manage to pin down some part of the intangibles of cities. Oh, and LA Plays Itself is an amazing documentary showing how even when you're not making a documentary you capture documentary details.

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Kate Jones's avatar

Great topic, Kate. I love reading literature set in the city and always find it difficult to connect to books and films set in the countryside. I also love living in a city, and am lucky in that where I live in the UK is purported to be the greenest city in Europe, where the trees outnumber people - a fact I love! - as well as being right on the edge of the Peak District National Park, so there is plenty of greenery as well as urban architecture. It is also a vibrant university city (with 2 large universities) and we live right by one of them. It means that the city always seems to be in flux as the students leave and return, and it makes for a multicultural as well as multi-generational population.

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