Junpei Okai

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Discussion Question

★★★★☆

March 26, 2014 - 2:54pm

Exploration of a city today is lost in a sense, but expanded in another. The heavy and prevalent reliance on digital communication has altered urban movement and interaction, an alteration from spontaneity to orchestration. In the contemporary world especially, time is the currency. We want to be here at this time so we can have lunch there then catch a cab in time for that. We no longer... more

Diagram/Map

Visibility on Crown

February 26, 2014 - 3:25pm

Reading Responses

Waiting for the Bus or Avoiding it?

February 26, 2014 - 2:07pm

Sikivu Hutchinson reveals, through Los Angeles’s history of urban transportation, the racial and gender inequalities of the American urban and suburban society in the last century, which persist to this day. The public transportation system is a lifeline for carless workers, an idea which drivers do not realize or sympathize with.

“[E]astside communities of color languished from a lack... more

Reading Responses

"The Metropolis and Mental Life" - Georg Simmel

February 19, 2014 - 3:02pm

Georg Simmel begins his essay by addressing the city's immediate effect on the "individual" -- that is to say, because we are constantly exposed to a flip book of external and internal stimuli, we knowingly, and eventually subconsciously, make decisions based on logic unhindered by emotion. These unrelenting contacts soon become regular, undifferentiated, a blur. Because we are... more

Photography Series

snow*

February 5, 2014 - 3:11pm

Snow is the detective that exposes urbanism. It filters the followers from the pathfinders. We see and feel it, yet it is gone in a moment.

Discussion Question

Communication and It's Impact on Metabolism of a City

February 5, 2014 - 2:01am

R.D. McKenzie points out that "many communities have passed through swift successive cycles of growth or decline, the determining factors being changes in forms and routes of transportation and communication and the rise of new industries." Although a conjecture of cause and effect, McKenzie makes a point applicable to the state of today's cities in the United States. Detroit,... more

Videos

Rhythms on Crown St.

January 30, 2014 - 12:09am

"Rhythms on Crown St." is a temporal progression of this downtown New Haven street through the lens of a passenger. Infrastructure, flora, people, and cars compose the sheet music that is Crown Street. These street instruments are layered over John Coltrane's jazz piece, My Favorite Things.

Junpei Okai + Jason Lee