Reading the Street

You probably live in a city or work in one. You might classify yourself as a creative. It is possible you actually work in a profession related to improving the city or are studying to do so. At the very least you have once walked down a street and asked yourself why it is the way it is. You might even have thought of ways to improve it.

This publication is a collection of such ruminations in the form of an essay, interviews with academics and a series of projects from two streets in very different European contexts. With the aim to explore the role of creative methods in urban research this publication looks at the ways in which cities are made and lived in. Using the examples of two cities - Milan and Tallinn - it tests how focusing on a single street could result in valuable broad insight into the neighborhood, city and state. Focusing more precisely on how techniques which are more commonplace in creative practices - media studies, photography, illustration, design, marketing etc. - can create new knowledge in conjunction with more traditional research methods.