STREETS OF ODDNESS

A street is a collection of cultural and spatial characteristics that define the vernacular lives of a place. In addition to monuments, landmarks, arts, and designed features, these characteristics could reflect in detailed moments that are accustomed or neglected in our daily routines, but at the same time being odd from foreign perspectives or when isolated in focus.

When walking on a foreign street, one can be easily attracted to local characteristics that are odd to their views. These characteristics can be urban moments, like a gang of Canadian gooses walking across bicycle lanes, mattresses waiting for pickup on a sidewalk, or a fruit track selling watermelons in the middle of a street. They can also be infrastructural, like traffic signs and lights hanging in the air by tensioned wires, steam coming out of maintenance holes on the street. In addition to foreign shocks, oddness can also happen on unnoticed details of our most familiar streets, such as the colorful traffic lights reflecting on the railed bottom surface of an overpass, a negligible but fascinating moment that could happen in most contemporary cities. By capturing and estranging these details, we can better read, question, and reimagine streets in our cities and globally.