Discover Top Posts Tagged with #urban diary

June 7, 2025. Surahammar, Sweden. By Jacob Hubertus. Follow me on Instagram

#street photography #urban photography #moody streets #city photography #everyday urban #moody tones #street aesthetic #urban diary #visual diary #quiet streets #city mood #aesthetic photography #urban solitude #moody city #street photo diary #artsy streets #urban exploration #city atmosphere #street lights #visual storytelling #moody street photography #urban aesthetic #original photographers #original art

Carry on, January 2019

Pimlico, London

#london #pimlico #Street Photography #Iphonography #urban diary

SN: harnessing the social media driven documentation of our surroundings, behaviors people exercise everyday, to curate a ‘diary’ of what citizens see as good or working in their neighborhoods.

With an “urban diary,” everyone’s a city planner

From Charles R. Wolfe, author of the book, Seeing the Better City, presents his idea for urban diaries to promote inclusive urban planning. An urban diary is more than either abstract idealism or the “citizen participation” of old. It takes advantage of what many of us are already doing with our cameras and smartphones: recording what we see, and what we like or dislike, about the cities we inhabit. Indeed, many of us are regularly creating urban diaries, of a sort, on our Facebook and Instagram feeds.

We can take it a step further, by intentionally observing and documenting our experience with photographs, sketches, or notes – and utilising what I call the LENS method (Look, Explore, Narrate, and Summarise.)

It’s easy to start. For example, visit your five favorite neighborhoods and record the sights and sounds you encounter. Or write a couple of paragraphs about your morning commute.

The information collected in an urban diary can be used in multiple ways – as a scalable tool to become more mindful of our surroundings, for example, and hence better advocates for thoughtful urban planning. Or it can be used to enhance traditional land-use or design-review processes, which now typically rely on conventional oral comment or written input from affected neighbors.

The urban diary can provide an inclusive alternative to abstract, top-down prescriptions by engaging a diverse range of city residents in civic dialogue. It can be used, in the words of planner Yuri Artibise, “to reintroduce the human experience into urban planning.”

The trick, of course, is to implement the all-too-frequent lip service to equity and inclusion, and apply the information from our urban diaries to the real world of decision makers and developers. Some pioneering cities are using similar approaches to do just that. In my hometown, Seattle, the Yesler Terrace Youth Media Project used the Photovoice platform to catalogue students’ concerns about a then-pending large-scale redevelopment of their public-housing community. Otherwise-overlooked voices provided Seattle Housing Authority project managers and city officials with invaluable image-laden insights about younger residents’ perceptions about change.

#urban planning #urbanism #seattle #urban diary #social media