The walls might not have ears, but they certainly are talking

Earlier this week I noticed some fresh gang graffiti on a wall near my house and told my wife what it meant as we walked past. She was shocked that to learn that what she had previously written off as useless scribble and vandalism was actually a very clear message, if you knew what to look for. Gang tagging, not to be confused with street art, has been an interest of mine for a while and I often forget that it’s not as blatantly obvious to everyone so I took this photo and wrote up a translation which you can read here if you are interested. The long and short of it is that 3 different but clearly recognizable gangs are competing for that location, which means there could be trouble ahead.

This got me thinking about how often in an urban environment the walls themselves can give us as much if not more information than a local newspaper about what is going on in an area, if we know what to look for. Unfortunately most people don’t, so I think when talking about urban survival brushing up on some of these languages and codes can be very useful. That said, there are a very few universal codes blended together with a near endless amount of specialized local ones but knowing a few things can help out a lot. Read more…

Throw away your GPS

Recently I’ve been thrown into a few situations where I need to think on my feet and navigate around cities without the aid of a GPS or Google Maps. After years of living with those two amazing tools my entire sense of navigation and direction have atrophied to the point of uselessness. Here’s the kicker, this wasn’t some strange city I’d never been to but a place where I had lived before for a significant period of time! Reliance on popping out our phones and looking up where the hell we are has become so pervasive that people are forgetting how to navigate on their own anymore.

I wrote the above paragraph yesterday as part of a post on maps and navigation in a city that I’ve had rummaging around in my head. Then as if a gift from the aether I woke up to this… GPS system ‘close to breakdown’. And it makes even more sense to me now to go back to old fashioned way finding. Losing such a ubiquitous technology would be pretty hard on a lot of folks like myself who have let our natural navigation abilities fade into the background as our reliance on GPS and Google Maps have moved to the forefront.

Every noob who moves to LA buys a Thomas Guide and when I first moved here about 15 years ago I was no exception. After 6 months of using it religiously I knew the city like the back of my hand. Once I got comfortable with my travels I stopped using it and haven’t looked at one since. The reason I mention it is because that part of the city I had memorized was the very same one that I had completely forgotten years later. It wasn’t the main streets I’d lost but the nuances of the side streets and the ability to pick out which way was North from any given location. I think a lot of us have gotten into that same pattern. We commute on the same roads day in day out or take the trains that bypass great swaths of civilization that we may someday have to traverse without GPS or even vehicles.

For the past several years I’ve lived in San Francisco. A small 7 mile by 7 mile city with less than a million people in it. I didn’t own a car and I walked about 5 miles a day. I knew a lot of the city by heart but I still used GPS and Google maps day in day out. I eventually found a way to engrain what I was seeing on the computer screen into my brain and it’s my first tip on learning your area.

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