My responses to Adam Greenfield’s street essay:

I’ve been thinking about the way the sidewalk and the road are meant to keep pedestrians and vehicles separate. With last week’s snow, the two blended together, and blurred the boundaries between people and cars. This is something that happens often in cities anyway (New York, with it’s lax jay walking enforcement being a prime example), but the removal of that line from my field of vision made me strut out into the street more boldly, while also eliminating the false security of the sidewalk.

There’s been recent success with doing away with traffic signs which suggests that such chaos actually makes us safer; by always being unsure of where other vehicles and pedestrians belong, we’re forced to pay attention all the time.

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I like Urban Markup Language as an information layer over the city, and I think looking at graffiti as grassroots UML could be a step in the direction of input/output graffiti that we talked about a few weeks ago. Though some attempts to make informatic graffiti have occurred, it’s never really caught on. Semacode is similar, and more flexible, but not human-readable. Can we annotate the city on the city, rather than on a map? Can we tell a story written on the sidewalk, a choose-your-own adventure where each chapter takes you around a different corner, your fate indelibly tied with the main character’s?

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Stories already happen all over the streets of New York. Every day we witness intimate moments of strangers’ lives. Despite the rise of third spaces on every corner, a lot of life is still lived in the street, if only because we need cell phone reception to tell our friends and lovers what’s on our minds.

The public street is sometimes the most private place we can reach at any given time. Anonymous and ephemeral strangers are often preferable to the roommates, friends, and familiars lurking inside - they may judge you in the moment, but they won’t remember you the next day.