Recent streetnotes items

An Anthology of Urban Habits

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How do bodies and cities shape each other through habit? An Anthology of Urban Habits -- a special issue of Streetnotes edited by Jorge de La Barre, Blagovesta Momchedjikova, and Jo Novelli-Blasko -- attempts to investigate that by showcasing 133 repeated activities and behaviors occurring in cities around the world: Antofagasta, Athens, Lisbon, London, New York City, Phoenix, Rio de Janeiro, Sofia, Tbilisi, and Tokyo. Organized alphabetically and contributed by 91 authors, the urban habits appear in ethnographic studies, documentary practices, academic research, poetry, photography, and original artwork. The volume includes the original Call for Papers for An Anthology of Urban Habits (see Appendix A), The Survey of Urban Habits (see Appendix B), which was developed with The Habitorium, and the resulting Report on the Survey of Urban Habits (see Appendix C).

Table of Contents: An Anthology of Urban Habits, Streetnotes 31.

Mon, 8 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

List of contributions in An Anthology of Urban Habits.

Appendix B: Survey of Urban Habits

Mon, 8 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This survey, developed by Jo Novelli-Blasko at The Habitorium, in collaboration with Blagovesta Momchedjikova and Jorge de La Barre, records urban habits. It was used to gather contributions to An Anthology of Urban Habits.

Appendix A: Call for Papers: Urban Habits, Streetnotes 31.

Mon, 8 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is the Call for Papers that was issued by the editors seeking contributions to "An Anthology of Urban Habits", Streetnotes 31.

Appendix C: Report on the Survey of Urban Habits

Mon, 8 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Report on the Survey of Urban Habits entails responses gathered through September 13, 2024. It includes several drawings by respondents, and graphic illustrations of the collected data.

Front Matter and Table of Contents 30

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Front Matter and Table of Contents 30

cover 30

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

cover 30

Introduction: Sketchbook: Drawing the City

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

An introduction to the issue and its content.

Tilted Upwards

Thu, 27 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

G.K. Chesterton’s short and surreal parable, “The Angry Street: A Bad Dream,” reminds us to not overlook things that surround us in everyday life, and to show them respect. Wayne Thiebaud’s paintings of cityscapes, inspired by San Francisco’s steep, building-lined streets, reestablish our links to the built environment with a vitality that sometimes the real—and the camera—lacks, but which drawing and painting bring to that which is represented. Chesterton and Thiebaud underscore how fictions are more evocative than truths. In this essay, accompanied by my own drawings of San Francisco’s steep streets, I suggest that fantastical fiction and art, in allegorical forms, can inspire us to reconnect with the material world around us—of things, and even streets—with renewed civility and respect.

Capturing Memories in My Sketchbook

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In this opportunity, I want to share a little glimpse of the memories and places I’ve been able to capture in my sketch-books all over the United States.I was born and raised in Guatemala and art has always been a really big thing in my life. Seven years ago, I decided to stop taking a lot of picture with my phone and instead capture the moments, memories and places I was able to experience. I thought that people take pictures to capture moments and places and maybe they’ll check them once in a while and some will be forgotten in just a few weeks. At least I have more than 10k photos in my phone and I can’t believe it. With my sketches the moments and places will always remain vibrant and I will always carry them with me no matter what.In the past few years, I’ve been traveling all around the US visiting family and friends so here are some of my favorite sketches of different States.

Urban Journeys of the Rhizomatic Line

Wed, 1 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Using visual hierarchy, representational media often separate diverse urban experiences. Three categories of foreground, middle ground, and background are easily distinguished in photography and painting. Urban sketches separate buildings, figures, and natural features. In architectural working drawing, “poché, entourage, and mosaïque” forms a structural system for representing cut walls, environment, and texture respectively [1] . Recently, photogrammetry or Lidar scanning claim to break these hierarchies by creating “a uniform unbiased document of things in space as they exist.” [2] ...

The Urban Presence of Sketchers

Sun, 15 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The presence of urban sketchers has an impact on pedestrian traffic and exchanges in the city. The nature of these exchanges depends on where people sketch from and whether they are alone or in a group. This piece includes sketches from the Christian Science Plaza in Boston, which were drawn in public by the author.

By Caricature Artists in Times Square (series)

Sat, 14 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In this series of drawings commissioned by Thomas Ray Willis, Portrait Artists in Times Square depict their pandemic-affected environment. In a project statement, Thomas Ray Willis provides his experience sitting with artists.

City Sketches (2018-2021)

Sun, 1 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Drawing is an act of discovery, according to the late culture critic John Berger. Drawing forces, the artist to look at the object, to dissect it in their mind’s eye and put it together again. Much like writing, drawing is also a means of observing and thinking about the world around you. Berger’s philosophy has animated many of my creative projects over the past five years. This is how I approach urban history: observation, reflection, and analysis. But I have discovered drawing as an intimate medium through which to think about my relationship to New York City.

Winter Drawings on the Université de Montréal Campus

Sun, 1 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

These sketches, drawn from my work-place, show the area around the Université de Montréal environmental design faculty in winter. From the windows where I drew them (sheltering from the cold), we see the surrounding landscape, as well as the mountain in the distance, through the leafless trees. These drawings, in black and gold ink and watercolor, evoke, on a small scale, the connections between the city and the landscape of the mountain – Mount Royal, the emblem of Montréal. Like landscape paintings with multiple grounds, they speak of the public space, the winter vegetation with its mesh of branches and the icons of Montréal.

“Space shapes a person; constraints free the soul”: Watercolour sketches of Moscow panel-block apartments on the eve of demolition.

Sun, 1 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This visual anthropology project was informed by a series of plein-air water-color sketches of panel-block apartment buildings, painted in conversation with ethnographic research participants in Moscow in 2021. Such housing, built on an industrial scale during Nikita Khrushchev’s mass-housing campaign between 1955 and 1964, and which came to be nicknamed khrushchevkas , became ubiquitous across the Soviet Union. In 2017, in Moscow, Russia, panel-block apartments were threatened by the renovatsiya campaign, which asked residents to vote to demolish their own homes, now declared dilapidated housing. The author painted a number of these apartment buildings slated for demolition, recording details in the construction, ornamentation, and topography of each apartment block. The author also gathered testimonies of artists who live in-, and whose artistic practice revolves around such housing, asking participants to share...

Dumbo, Brooklyn

Sun, 1 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Streetscape of Dumbo, Brooklyn in April

Mohammadabad Isfahan

Sun, 1 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hand-painted images of the historic city of Mohammadabad Jarghoye, located near the city of Isfahan, which dates back to the Qajar period at the end of the 18th century. These plans include the entrances of the houses and the general view of the city.

Seoul 2022

Sun, 1 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Drawings from an online ethnography class and a discussion of the impact on student experience.

Cover

Mon, 14 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Credits: Layout: LinDa Saphan. Photos by authors. Top left : Seth Tobocman and Tamara “Tornado” Wyndham, “NYC Story,” 2022. Middle left : Amy Zhang, “Colors of Sunset Park” Patterns Identification and Development, 2022. Middle right : Sruthi Atmakur-Javdekar, “Across the Bridge,” 2015. Top right : Angelique Vieira, Untitled, 2021. Bottom : Javier Otero Peña, “Free style Guerrilla Gallery, showing aesthetic empathy,” October 31, 2019. Background : Kelly Yu, “Sketch H1”, 2022.

Mon, 14 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Table of Contents

Tree with Moons

Sun, 6 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The sculpture began with wanting to process grief. One of my brothers passed away in his sleep (unrelated to Covid) in 2020 after pandemic travel restrictions made it impossible to gather for a funeral. Over the course of my making, which is process-based – an intuitive approach to materials and methods – the form evolved into a tree with three moons. The tree is a cross-cultural symbol of loss and renewal. Each month we can observe, too, the moon appearing and disappearing from view, a metaphor for the ephemeral nature of existence.

The mind struggles to accept the notion of death as inevitable, coming to all. The Vietnamese Zen monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, has written that when we are alive, we are part of the sky, the earth, the clouds. When we pass, we continue to be part of everything. I look up into the trees and the sky and know the spirit of my mother, my father, and my brother continue.

Poetry has always been an informing influence in my studio production. In...

New York City Story

Sun, 6 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This comic strip is my response to hearing that mayor Eric Adams has called for an 6% rent increase for New York Cities’ rent stabilized tenants. The rent stabilization laws protect a large number of NYC tenants by limiting the size of rent increases a landlord can charge on the renewal of a lease. In recent years those increases were about 1% or 2%, but the new mayor has proposed 6%, a significant escalation.

Many justifications have been advanced for this increase. The rising cost of gas. The fact that the previous administration kept rent increases to a minimum. The two-year moratorium on evictions during COVID. I felt that the only way to explain how devastating this reversal in policy was going to be, was to present the overall trajectory of the housing situation in NYC, not over years, but decades.

When I came to NYC in the 1970s it was pretty easy to find an affordable place to live, even if you were poor. It was a city where someone could start at the bottom...

Identities of Self and Place in Sunset Park: The Unmaking of the Gowanus Expressway

Sun, 6 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This project explores the intersecting qualities of place, time, and identity through the work of a graduate design studio at Rice School of Architecture. “Identities of Self and Place in Sunset Park: The Unmaking of the Gowanus Expressway,” challenges students to activate a residual urban space through a broad reading of its surrounding cultural, physical, and programmatic site conditions. The project site, located beneath the Gowanus Expressway in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, is a typical example of how transportation infrastructure of the past bifurcated communities and sent neighborhoods into decline. Architecture designed through the lens of Place, Time, and People can produce responsive spaces that address historical injustices while allowing for multiple readings and experiences.

Students began their research with a design methodology based in both direct and remote observation of the project site. They examined the local conditions and expanded into the surrounding...

Outdoor Dining and the Transformation of Public Space in New York City

Sun, 6 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

New York City’s streetscapes have undergone a dramatic transformation as a result of the city’s Open Restaurants program. Established in June of 2020 to uplift the restaurant industry out of economic turmoil brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, the program led to outdoor dining structures sprouting across the urban landscape. Due to its overall success, the city is currently preparing to launch a permanent program, which has led to conflicts between some of the city’s stakeholders as the space used for outdoor dining overlaps with public spaces such as sidewalks and streets. Drawing from urban planning and environmental psychology students’ research projects, this paper explores the ways in which outdoor dining has transformed public space in New York City using Lefebvre’s spatial theory as a guide. Over the course of a semester, students analyzed city blocks in the Bronx and Manhattan using multiple methods including historical analysis of block changes and field observations....

A Daily Practice in Memories of a Lived Experience: Bridging Pune and New York City

Sun, 6 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

What happens when the present (perceived or real space) is ‘conceived’ (as artwork) from memories of a lived experience?

According to Lefebvre, ‘representational space’ is space as directly (or lived) experienced by users through “associated images and symbols” (p. 39); one that is passively experienced or felt – “a space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate” (1974/1991, p. 39).

Like New York City and perhaps other cities in urban India, Pune has been experiencing rapid transformation where the urban landscape is dotted with high-rise developments in residential, industrial, institutional and commercial sectors. However, Pune has a unique urban landscape given its geographical locational advantage of being nestled in the rich and biologically diverse Sahyadri mountain range or the Western Ghats. As a result, the city boasts of small hills that are marked by urban planners, technocrats, and those in power as bio-diverse areas - spaces where no urban...

Introduction: New York City in Transformation

Sun, 6 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The editors of Streetnotes 29: New York City in Transformation provide an introduction to the issue and its content.

Playing Chess in Public: Recreational Traditions in a Time of Crisis

Tue, 17 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Based upon a series of ethnographic vignettes, interviews, participant observation, and archival research, this article profiles public chess playing in Greenwich Village, New York City. I focus upon the famed public spaces for chess players like Washington Square Park and Union Square, and the atmosphere of anxiety and unrest due to the Covid-19 Pandemic and systemic racism surrounding the protests of the summer of 2020. The long artistic and revolutionary history of Greenwich Village provides an intriguing context for public chess playing and the informal economy of hustling. As the majority of the chess enthusiasts and table hosts are African American men and, given the metaphoric explanations of “chess as life,” sociopolitical context is critical. In particular, political artistic displays and protests against police violence and systemic racism are no mere backdrop for chess playing, but intimately felt and entangled within the sense of place and...

The Guerrilla Gallery: A Rapid Ethnography about a Collaborative Public Art Installation in East Harlem

Sun, 1 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In the heart of East Harlem, New York City, a collective of artists called the Harlem Art Collective created the “Guerrilla Gallery”: A collaborative public art installation on a construction fence, to give residents a place to express themselves through art and messages. While East Harlem is characterized by murals depicting Puerto Rican flags and political causes, these symbols were absent in the Guerrilla Gallery, which instead exhibited predominantly Mexican cultural and political symbols. Was a territorial contestation taking place through art, a sort of identity negotiation to determine who “belongs” in the neighborhood? (Zukin, 1995) This article presents an ethnographic and photographic narrative of the Guerrilla Gallery and what it means to the people who live in the neighborhood. Using rapid ethnographic assessment procedures (Low et al., 2005), coupled with photographic cartography (Ulmer, 2017), this study presents the findings of interviews and the Guerrilla Gallery....

Front Matter and Table of Contents

Fri, 11 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Front Matter and Table of Contents

cover

Fri, 11 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

cover

Buzzing Calligraffiti

Sun, 30 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This series of artworks explore the human perceptions of space, presence, belonging, communication, movement, resilience, and regrowth during the ongoing pandemic in New York City. In a dynamic spatial ontology, past-present-future palimpsests exist as our spatiotemporal perception of reality. Current pandemic trapped humans (including myself) in situ, and, in a way, recontextualized human social spatiability and psychogeographic perception of space, adding layers of introspection. During lockdowns, as the only means to communicate with other people was via digital technologies, entire life (work, school, religious service, exercising, entertainment, socializing, dating, etc.) moved online. This new spatiotemporal reality emerged as a form of resilience and solidarity in the time of crisis. New York City, the city that never sleeps, started to buzz again. In a dance between the real and the imaginary, the transient and the permanent, on and off screen, the virtual and the real,...

Being-with-ears: How Christian Benning Opened my Ears to the Soundscapes of New York City and Beyond

Sun, 23 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This writing explores the phenomenology of everyday urban sounds, some generic, others more place specific sounds to New York, or particular places within New York with samplings from Manhattan, the Queensboro Bridge and Queens. It takes the perspective of a walker and Environmental Psychologist, a commuter on the way to work. The experience was inspired and made possible by a recital by multi-percussionist Christian Benning that introduced listeners to different sounds and music. In this writing “New York City in transformation” refers to the transformation of sounds via the experience of walking, and the transformation experienced through a newfound aesthetic and meaning to sounds as my ears had been opened: everyday sounds that previously escaped my attention, sounds that I have taken for granted, or considered as a nuisance, have transformed from noise to sound (from Krach to Klang...

Swimming Sounds