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[muckefuck]

For some reason, I was wondering in my dream last night which cities I could claim to "know". Obviously, there's not another I know like I know Chicago--not even my hometown of St Louis. But I also don't mean cities I've only been through once or twice. I'm thinking in terms of cities where I have enough sense of the layout, the landmarks, and the transport to get around relatively comfortably. Places where, if someone described the location of some site, I'd have an idea of where it was and how to get there.

Here's the list I've come up with, in rough order of familiarity. It pretty much corresponds to the amount of time I've spent in each place, but not entirely. Other factors include the recentness of my visit and how much I've research I've done. (For instance, I've read much more about Barcelona over the years than Toronto.):

1. Chicago
2. St Louis
3. San Francisco
4. Toronto
5. New York [Manhattan only]
6. Beijing
7. Berlin
8. Barcelona
9. Freiburg (Breisgau)
10. Vienna
11. Xi'an
12. Paris

Cites I've stayed in which didn't make the list include Granada, Seattle, LA, Amsterdam, Prague, Budapest, Ávila, and Rome. I'm mildly embarrassed not to see any UK cities on the list, but it's been ages since my last visit and London bamboozled me even back then and all the British media I've consumed since then hasn't really helped (except to expand the number of placenames that I recognise but couldn't find on a map without help). But the real shame is the lack of American cities. Even my birthplace doesn't rank!

What's your list?

Comments

[pne.livejournal.com]

Probably just Hamburg. Oh, and Wolfsburg, perhaps, I suppose.

I might be able to do Munich with public transport, since I went there twice and spent a bit of time preparing, but I don't know any landmarks there etc.

[enf.livejournal.com]

Chicago always seemed unknowably vast to me. I can navigate within it, but I don't think I ever really knew any area of it other than Hyde Park. San Francisco is the only place larger than a neighborhood that I've ever felt like I actually knew.

But by the can-you-navigate-without-a-map standard:

1. San Francisco
2. Oakland
3. Berkeley
4. Chicago
5. Indianapolis

and that's probably about it.

[princeofcairo.livejournal.com]

1. Chicago
2. Oklahoma City
3. New York City (mostly, but by no means entirely, Manhattan)
4. London
5. Las Vegas
6. Los Angeles

and, probably,

7. San Francisco

are the cities I really know, outside a single neighborhood or downtown area. (Milwaukee, Columbus, and Indianapolis, for example, I know about 20 square blocks of intimately, but would be buffaloed by anywhere else in their urbus.) I have buried or latent knowledge of Seattle, Dallas, and a handful of others that would probably come flooding back after a day or so.

But I'm generally confident in my urban-navigation skills, even in unfamiliar, non-Anglophone cities. Given a map and a decent starting point, I could probably build a pretty good working knowledge of a city in little time, and get myself to an unfamiliar location in considerably less.

[hanskramladen.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

What counts as a city? Anyway, here is my list (based on "I can find my way without a map, mostly"):

1. Bonn (where I'm currently living)
2. Mönchengladbach
3. Beirut
4. Almaty
5. Berlin
6. Chirchik (Uzbekistan)
7. Ulaanbaatar
8. Tashkent (a bit hazy already)
9. Bochum (only the centre and the South)
10. Wroclaw (mostly around the centre)

So we have one overlap.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

The only possibly questionable "city" on your list is Chirchiq, but if I counted Freiburg (which is roughly the same size and about as distant from other conurbations), then it should qualify, too. Evanston, where I work, calls itself a "city", but I just think of it as an appendage of Chicago.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

The more I think about this question the more complex it seems: on the one hand, one can thoroughly know small cities quite easily, but who can really claim to "know" any of the world's really big metropolitan areas? I lived in London for 5 years, but I can only navigate about a quarter to a fifth of the centre without a map. So, my revised list, subdivided into "smaller than Freiburg" and "selected areas of..."

stF:

1. Oxford
2. Truro
3. New Brunswick, NJ
4. Princeton, NJ
5. Ithaca, NY
6. Leiden

sao:

7. central/west London, from Putney to High Holborn
8. Manhattan
9. Baltimore
10. Amsterdam
11. Rio de Janeiro, but really only Copacabana, Ipanema/Leblon, Lagoa.

Depending on how selective your knowledge can get while still being useful for this list, I might be able to stretch to The Hague and Paris.

How many dead cities do you know?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

How many dead cities do you know?

What is this, a kōan?

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

Almost. I was thinking about Bukhara again, and realising that the bit of it that I "know" is basically a collection of open-air museum buildings. I could also claim to "know" Ayutthaya, Merv and Nisa (the bits that are archaeological sites), but "knowing" them is trivial: their total surviving, "knowable" street plan comprises a few blocks each. The living towns attached to some of them? Not so much.

[joliecanard.livejournal.com]

On the "can I navigate without a map" criterion, I'm not sure I could totally count Toronto, the city I've been living in for 4 years. At least, I couldn't do without a map outside the downtown core. I could navigate in Skopje, where I've only spent a total of about a month, almost as well as Toronto, simply because it's a much smaller area to know.
But, if we go with "if someone described the location of some site, I'd have an idea of where it was and how to get there," here's the list.

1. Sarasota
2. Gainesville
3. Toronto
4. Moscow
5. Skopje
6. Ohrid (so small, though, it's hardly an accomplishment)

And if you gave me a day to re-acclimate, I could probably do Avignon and Valjevo.

[joliecanard.livejournal.com]

There are a lot of things in New York I could find without a map relatively easily, but it's not on my list because there are many more things I couldn't find.

[gasterea.livejournal.com]

Well, one can't really resist this one!

My list would be smth like, these are cities where I am comfortable without a map (at least in the central parts):

1. Moscow (32 years, not really surprising)
2. Toronto (on and off for two years and I love this city)
3. Padua (3 months and it's a small one, so I know my way around it)
4. Paris
5. St. Petersburg
6. Bordeaux
7. London
8. may be even Berlin (or may be just wishful thinking on my part)