Welcome to Where

Hello! Thanks for checking out my blog.

I want to start off by introducing myself. I have been studying the urban form and the built environment for over a decade now. I first got interested in cities when my fascination with theme parks got me hooked on books about Las Vegas. These led to a more general interest in urbanity and, following a (presumably) logical progression, architecture. I started out my college education as an architecture major, but decided that it was not for me. I am less interested in the process of designing buildings than I am about the ideas behind them, and how they fit into the larger context of society and contemporary culture.

Over the past year I have become very interested in the concept of "place," and how it is defined. With the Where blog, I'll be examining this concept from different perspectives, on different scales -- the macro and the micro. What makes New York feel so different from Chicago? How do we define "character" in relation to establishing a sense of place? How do people use place to define who they are, internally and externally? How do our physical senses enhance our perception of place? What role does architecture play in successful placemaking? And what, exactly, does it mean to "make" place?

As you can probably tell, I have plenty of questions. In this blog I'll wander past all of those mentioned, and many more that will pop into my head and/or evolve out of and between each other. I'll be focusing more on the urban/suburban environment that is so prevalent in contemporary life, but that doesn't mean that the rural won't sneak in once in a while. And I hope that this will be a participatory blog; I am not doing this to see my thoughts spelled out on-screen. I hope that you, the reader, will get involved in discussions here. In the long term, if I am able to build up some kind of readership, it would be fantastic to be able to have guest bloggers and that sort of thing spring out of discussions, to really have a dialogue about how and why we create and percieve places the way that we do (sorry...sounded a bit like Hilary there for a second.)

Thanks again for visiting this blog. Welcome to Where.