It’s been a long hiatus from writing in this space, but as Alain de Botton says
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And travel, my reliable muse, has not only brought me back to familiar places but reignited the passion for the ideas that I have developed throughout this blog.
Where were we? Oh yes, hyperlocal is hard.
The quest to assemble a local guide for the global citizen has taught me that Hyperlocal is hard. While cities have a convenient way to measure their boundaries, narrowing a particular area within a city with a very specific mindset or spirit seems a lot harder. We often fail to recognize that a lively neighbourhood is the sum of its core commercial strip, the back alleys that hide its best secrets, the surrounding residential areas that define the character of its inhabitants and the eternal flow of people that make it their favourite. Now imagine trying to define a [...]
It is still going to take a bit more time to finish the guide to the St. Lawrence Market in Toronto, but I’m so proud of the work that has been done to date that wanted to at least give you a flavour of what is coming.
St. Lawrence Market – our photoshoot
I’ll be giving away the guide online under a CC license, but you’ll have to wait a bit longer. If you’re a writer or photographer and would like to get involved in the production of a similar guide for your city, please let me know.
coming soon: our guide to St. Lawrence Market, Toronto
If you’ve been following our Global Culture Tour, you know our second destination is the St. Lawrence Market. A very lively neighbourhood in downtown Toronto, this area will also give us a great opportunity to explore interesting attributes that make places like these desirable to the global citizen. Could one of them be a good international bookstore where you can get your latest Monocle?
coming soon: our guide to Coyoacán, México City
Although I had already shown a little preview of our first photo shoot in Coyoacán, here is another teaser. One of the reasons I’ve delayed the posting of the final photos is because we were very fortunate to gain access to a museum in the area that will give this guide a very distinct visual identity. Our crew was back in this neighbourhood just a few days ago and soon you’ll be able to enjoy a very unique journey through one of the most serene areas of Mexico City.
I can’t believe we’re already halfway through October. It’s been a while since my last photo post on a Saturday. Hope you enjoy it.
I find a little bit ironic that Google released their new “Places” page at the same time that National Geographic Traveler celebrates their 25th anniversary with a collector’s edition featuring “50 Places of Lifetime“. My opinion in this matter is likely very biased as this is what I do for a living: try to figure out how to best convey the qualities that make a particular destination desirable to the traveler and build websites that attempt to organize such knowledge. But it is a very tough problem and the attempt from Google, while strategic is perfect proof of how far we are from capturing the essence of travel.
Call it the “curse of memorable places”: you’ve just spent a couple of weeks at what you believe has been the greatest journey of your lifetime only to come back and try to articulate into a “travel blog” how great it was or create a slideshow of your obviously less than stellar photography. Perhaps the only satisfaction that results from these failed attempts to convey the grandiosity of a trip is that your boring interpretation will keep this treasure safe from others “discovering” it.
This is [...]
Picking the first few destinations for the Global Culture Tour is a matter of convenience. We think we’ll cover 4 or 5 micro-regions before the end of the year and we hope their variety and the fresh content will keep people interested while we produce more. As I mentioned in previous posts, the first one was a very simple decision: Coyoacán is very close to my heart as I lived there many years, but it has also been able to maintain its personality throughout the centuries (yes, it is that old). During recent visits I grew confident that although Mexico City has many things to offer, the global citizen would find in this particular area of the city an interesting retreat from all the fast-paced action that takes place everywhere else.
The second destination will be an area in my current city: Toronto. Deciding which particular neighbourhood, however, has not been so simple. Toronto has many faces and changes very fast. I’ve been looking back at my own notes about what makes an ideal destination for the global citizen and keep bouncing between two areas: St. Lawrence Market and [...]
For those of you who follow @globalculture on Twitter, you’ve already seen this, but there is one thing you probably haven’t noticed. We started publishing the results from our first photo-shoot in our Flickr pool “I could live here“. Kudos to our photographer in Mexico as he worked really hard to translate a loose vision of what this could be into our first tangible results:
Click to view the photos of Coyoacan in Flickr
While you will see these photos appear in this blog in a few days as part of our new local content section, there are two important aspects of this project that may not be obvious at first:
1. Every single photo we decide to publish has been given a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. This means that any one can freely use these photos for their own causes, commercial or not. All we ask for is the attribution.
2. The Flickr pool is a way for us to recruit photographers willing to do the same for their own neighbourhoods. We’ve set it up as “invitation-only” because we want to make sure that everyone who joins understands how their work should be [...]
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