Andrew Schroeder

It has been an insanely good evening and I’m going to do my damnedest to keep this short and sweet. After a few perfectly mixed cocktails at the Aster Cafe, I found myself wandering around Northeast Minneapolis. Instead of waiting for the bus, I continued to drift up Hennepin Avenue, circling aimlessly around, until I ended up back at the bus stop, staring into the eyes of an nun who was also enjoying the first real spring evening.

Anyway. The future. Yes! That’s what’s been on my mind. Specifically, what is the future of our cities going to look like if we keep pushing for New Urbanist developments? The condos that now line both banks of the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis are a good example. While I applaud the renewed interest in the heart of the city, I’m skeptical of the end results. Getting to the point. Why is it that in order to make people come back to the diversity of the city, we have to completely replace it with generic condo buildings with eco-ironic use of sheet metal adornments?

I’d really like to start a movement. It isn’t New Urbanism, it is simply called Urbanism. It is not the homogenization and sterilization of our urban spaces, but instead is the fruits of their diversity. What makes urban spaces so desirable is not the safety of the familiar, but instead the unknowable complexities that arise when the rich and the poor and the whole mix of our species live next to each other.

(One may ask why the above photo is posted. It is a scan of a c-print from an archive of Japanese train photos I acquired. Someone had the interest, bordering on obsession, to return again and again to Tokyo and photograph, what must have been at the time, the futuristic-looking landscape. There is just something inherent in the city of Tokyo that invokes feelings of what is yet to come… This is just one of about 100 photos that show this constant revision of what “the future” looks like… What a fantastic way to spend one’s yearly vacations.)

Abandoned racetrack near Hudson, Wisconsin.

The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.

Michel Foucault
Of Other Spaces (1967), Heterotopias.

How could a 15 foot tall fiber glass statue of an Egyptian anubis possibly look out of place in Minnesota? Huh?

Very rarely jet lag can be an amazing tool. For example, had I not been a complete sleepless zombie last night i would have not been able to get up at 5 this morning to run out the door and start making photographs. The morning light in Saigon is radiant and beautiful. As I discovered this morning, if one gets up incredibly early, you can avoid the craziness of the moped traffic and actually see the ways the urban fabric has been constructed. So, it is. 8 am and I’ve already tackled my goal of photographing the Saigon river and surrounding environs. Absolutely beautiful, but i can only share a few quick digital composition shots.
Ll