I start to like plymouth. amazing, its only four weeks I live here now and things are getting familiar.
I have to say plymouth is horrible, really. I haven't experienced anything like it before. in any way this place is far behind state of the art development and one wonders how this can happen in a country like england. it is a fact that the west region here is the poorest in the country and it is clearly laking of inspiration. but still how come basic things just don't happen like in other places?
throughout organization seems to be something people down here have heard of but it seems to be quite difficult for them to put in place. I am not talking about individuals, this is a society thing here. one almost could say that the context is just not allowing these things to happen. everything here is so mixed up that one can't put his things right.
basic things like waste collection, provided by the council just don't work. no one knows what day of the week the collection happens in a area. for my street, the landlord told me collection is on wednesday, my neighbor tells me it is on fridays. it appears to be on thursday one week, and no at all the other week. so we end up with a street full of rubbish bags. people here just don't care and drive their cars over it and the seagulls do the rest. rubbish all over the place, for one week! until the next collection. and then the collectors show up in the middle of the night and just pick up the half empty bags. since then the street gets slowly cleaned by wind and birds... (amazing how some kind of natural cleaning within an urban environment occurs...)
this goes on at university, not with rubbish, but other organization related tasks. I don't want to go in details with that.
but back to the beginning although of these facts I really start liking the place. amazing, how can this be? I should hate the place.
I realized that I get familiar with the place just yesterday as we had guest here from switzerland. we took them for a walk around our place. surprisingly to me I was quite proud of showing them round my city. this felt odd because of the reasons explained earlier. I couldn't even find one of these worst case plymouth places to show. on every corner I already had some kind of personal memory/experience that put a relationship between me and the space in place. I can point this out because of the reference of our guests. they where totally new to the place and everything (like everything) here was new to them, but for me, I am only relatively new, navigating and "organizing" in space here seems to be already familiar.
I think this comes from an understanding for the urban fabric that I was able to build up over the last few weeks. at the moment I can think of two elements that make this familiarizing possible. one is the feeling for spacial relationships and the other one is memeories/experiences within this space.
as one can see on my plymouth track maps I have been walking around the city. not everywhere but around the center. not systematically, just everyday uses. as these tracks almost all are walking lines, I kind of developed a body related feeling for the space. I know how it is to walk to the sea, not by hart but by feet.
the other elements of memories is more related to the activities I have be up to in the urban environment. everyday activities, but the now already provide a sense a familiarity to the place. I know the guy that sells the BIG ISSUE next to the shopping center, I am familiar with the elderly people driving around in their motorized wheelchairs, or the group of street musicians playing music on highstreet on the weekend. or personal connection such as maliks favorite shop (disney store) or the place where the skaters hang out at the fountain. or the other fountain where the three girls collected the coins the other day... impressions that bring up the relation ship with an urban environment.
