Term: Issue 12: Cities
Explore all pages categorised under the heading Issue 12: Cities below.
All categories can be seen on the main index page.
Edinburgh
Edinburgh feels like a moody melancholic gentleman filled with more talent than he can use. And when the sun shines, you feel like the only...
How to Survive the Streets as a Girl in the Old Medina
You’re having a good hair day (unusual, I know!). It’s rarely necessary to plough the stork nest with a comb, yet today your mane is...
My Shadows and I
My sculptural and digital images are a reflection of my past and present, projecting my life stories across a range of urbanscapes. I call them...
Nights in the Suburb
Two years ago I moved to a new community in a very remote suburb, which blends in with the surrounding rural areas forming a unique...
Movement
“Murakami kind of ruined writing about jazz for everyone else,” said a friend, well, a boss really, but he feels like a friend. I’ll try....
Mirror Hours in Kathmandu
9:11 am. There it is again, on my phone and out of place. This time I am in Namo Buddha, a pilgrimage site way above...
Green Walls Lit in the Night
At the point when part of me knew our relationship would be over soon, we were living in a country governed by its military. We...
To the Señora on the First Floor
You are the oldest señora in our building. I first noticed you during the earthquake that took place three months after I arrived in Mexico...
Remember, Breathe
1. Decide to study abroad in Scotland for four months. When your family takes to the airport, you’re shaking. Almost turn back. Almost give up....
My Wilderness Refuge in the City
For many years I’ve lived on a bluff with a wilderness in my backyard. However, I don’t live in some remote area but in Anchorage,...
L.A. Cinemas: The City’s Real Houses of Worship
You’re here, and it’s a party but you feel like you’re stepping into a cathedral, and the crowded bar glows like an altar. L.A. worships...
Flipbook Corn
Outside the window an endless ocean of tall green cornstalks stretched for miles alongside the highway. The perfectly aligned rows at 70 miles per hour...
Departure Point
Every river seems to have a place like this; somewhere small boats go to die. The rotting fibreglass carcasses of forgotten pleasure craft and Sunday...
A Perpetual Chameleon Dance
The Tate Modern, the National Portrait Gallery, the Natural History Museum, the fabulous Victoria and Albert… all of them fabulous, and within walking distance. But...
This Car-Centric City Makes Me Dream Of Third Places
the dream: – there is a café: — Its façade: a verdant ivy waterfall calling souls to seek solace from the urban hustle welcomes humans...
The City
I aborted one, then another. Legs splayed to a darkened sky, the city is hollow, cavernous, a mother buried with dead-born child. I popped a...
Philadelphia: A Ghazal
I never noticed a sound in my childhood room in Philadelphia, not the horn-blaring, teenage screaming, razzle-dazzle nighttime streets of Philadelphia. I slept deeply in...
Nungua & The Ritual of Rain
at the end of it there is this thing—words; we share them like sticks of smoke, our lips black with abandon for writs and tales...
Mexico City
For lunch ant eggs with worms. 900 pesos, though … Only the rich can afford such courage.
Lahaina Noon
They say there were no shadows at the height of that afternoon. Constricted to a single point, we were isolated, no secondary bodies.
Hamlet's Mirror
While gold and dollars pile up in banks and smoke from gunpowder spirals in the air, I stand, outfitted, in the village church before I...
Free Radicals
1. Amid roaring trucks, giraffe-neck cranes, all-day hammering, bicycle lanes, curbside cafés where waiters pour wine and teenagers hunch over takeout, a hoarse screech.
City of Incense
a slow haze rolls over any answers to prayers the stars sent — their light too long ago to reach still, the cathedral’s candle votives...
After Math
i. What’s Left Cracked bricks, fixtures, fencing, Hooks & some wire, torn corners of insulation stapled to Warped wood. Ash. Porcelain tiles spilt like playing...
Without Rhyme of Reason
“Everything there looked foreign,” you said. That must have been in one of our early conversations though not the earliest. You were talking about your...
Cut Through: Graves and Cats through a Samurai trail
From a distance, the houses encrusting the hills of the Kotsubo neighbourhood remind me of barnacles. They crowd together, layer upon layer, hiding the surface...
In Company With Spiders
Most of the spiders living in the house that I share with my husband and our terrier are the small-bodied, long-legged variety. They station themselves...
What Would He Have Said?
To Pay Our Respects. As we stand at the gates of the Mauthausen concentration camp, more than at any other time previously, I feel acutely...
The Goat in the Stairwell
The commotion outside our apartment highlighted the quiet within. Unspoken words poked at the cracks in our marriage, picking them apart, unravelling their edges. They...
Symphony of the Train
1. linden. 2. central. 3. noyes. 4. foster. 5. davis. 6. howard. 7. waiting on the platform. 8. granville. 9. cermak-chinatown. 10. swiping out.
Spiritual Identity
I am neither the mind, nor the intellect, memory, nor ego. Nor am I ears, nor tongue. I am not the nose, nor eyes, nor...
In the Hall of Forbidding Signage
The Hall of Forbidding Signage, an exhibit in the Museum of Urban Life, was a memorial of warning plaques, notices, and placards, screwed on every...
The Woman Who Marries
The buildings had grown fangs, the street lamps whiskers. Billboards flocked to the skyline, pecked at star-scatter. Town cars beaked their way between gnarled claws...
A Dark Night
Night falls softly upon the land, warm and comforting like a childhood blanket, wrapping around her with an array of celestial freckles. The shade of...
With Grace
They’d gone on much longer than she’d expected them to. A quick bite had turned to two courses, a drink had turned to five, and...
Fishkids
This is the furthest I’ve ever been from the centre of Leicester. I was born there and haven’t moved since. We all know about the...
The Hungarian Vegetarian
I’m not sure if my father was joking when he told me over the phone that my grandmother would be turning in her grave if...
Pastizzi
I am twenty years old and have just eaten what I think is the most perfect pastry in the world. But I think I’m in...
Dry Land Fishing
A couple carrying rough bags are walking down the railroad tracks in front of my house in Jeremiah, Kentucky. Thin and young, they are dressed...
In Search of a Lost Japantown
Welcome to Tacoma, Washington, USA, my adopted hometown. Tacoma is the third-largest city in Washington State, after our “big sister” city that gets all the...
Srinagar: Occupation by Day & Night
I arrive on a domestic flight from Delhi to Srinagar during Ramadan in 2018, registering as a foreigner three times, palms sweating and grateful that...
Marrakech’s Medina: “A Simple Path of Reading”
When I travelled to Marrakech a year ago, I never imagined that I would return. Yet, back in New York City, something about the Marrakshi...
Berkeley to Berkeley via Bombay
My father’s white hair frames his cocoa-coloured face. The rest of his frail body is hidden by the blankets except for the arm with the...
Dreaming in Diaspora
I have always been a dream collector–someone who pays attention to dreams, writes them down, looks them up, and tries to interpret their messages. When...
Food Shopping in Rome
In the US, naturally, I drove to the supermarket. The route led down a pot-holed avenue walled with office buildings. I loaded a cart with...
Just Breathe
Feet dragging from the elevator, I punch in the pin to my front door, ready to escape the heat and humidity of my three-minute walk...
Cemetery Conversations with My Dead Dad
In 2019, I returned to London for the first time since 1990. I remembered the city vividly, both because I’d looked at the photos countless...
Mission Dolores Park: A Map Oneirica
My right fibula hurts when I walk as a Boricua in San Francisco, dreaming of the home I left. Nobody knows my name here, nor...
African Venice: Explore the African Presence in Venice through 10 Walks
Decolonising Travel Senior Editor Faith Adiele sat down with Shaul Bassi, Italian co-author of African Venice: A Guide to Art, Culture and People, the first...
The Cheesemaker's Daughter
When I heard that Kristin Vuković was publishing a novel about a family of cheesemakers, and that the story had an international backdrop connected to...
A Haunting of Memory
The tandem release of Faith Adiele’s two new books, Voice/Over and Her Voice, create a hand-in-hand hybrid memoir in two different forms. Her Voice is...
What Makes A Place Home
Marina Maržić’s life is in disarray. She is in her native Croatia, uncertain about returning to the marriage, job, and life she abruptly left behind...
Dreams of Lost Buttresses
Night after night, a young climber dreams of a singular buttress, lit gold by sun, on the vanishing point of the horizon. Each time she...
Yellow on Yellow
In her wide-open sanctuary a female sun moth’s yellow patches are hard to spot as she lies against grasses allowed to fend for themselves in...
The Great Falafel War of Egypt
My time in Egypt through the auspices of the Fulbright-Hays Seminars Abroad allowed for many smaller-scale experiences that augmented the wonderful lectures and visits to...
My Transit Dance Rhythms
In the early morning, before golden streaks of light wash the sky, I head out. Breezing past the long, unspectacular Telegraph in fits and stops,...
Pieces of Time Caught
We cross the arctic as it tips toward 6 a.m. There are two colours: Shell and shadow. Daylight lands in steps of light. Onyx, galaxy,...
Namesake
I struggled mightily with coins during my first few days in Japan. My internal currency converter—shoved bleary-eyed and yawning onto the streets of Tokyo—required a...
In Salt Lake City, Everyone and Everything is Queer*
While standing at the bar waiting for The Sun’s bartender to grab my Corona, I noticed a man with thinning brown hair, medium height and...
Last Life in Taipei
A layover on the island because of engine trouble. I had a whole night to walk around a city that I only knew from the...
The Glass Flock
Sometimes the voice from the heavens isn’t what you’d expected. The sound of flapping wings draws my eyes upward as I walk toward the old...
Water Killed My Grandpa!
Sometimes, I go back to the past when my grandparents used to wander the great landscapes of the Sahara. Before colonialism, my people would take...
Loneliness in Rio
Above Copacabana Beach, in the coworking space, with its anaemic air-conditioning and the emerald Atlantic pulsing under sunlight past the window, expat bros dropped code...
Neighbours
I walk out of my building—a fifteen-year-old highrise—and greet the neighbour who hasn’t paid his maintenance dues since we moved in. I am surprised to...
Yinka Shonibare CBE
British Nigerian Yinka Shonibare returns after two decades to the Serpentine Gallery with a compact greatest hits exhibition plus bonus tracks. A constant is his...
Judy Chicago
This retrospective is titled Revelations after the unpublished manuscript Judy Chicago wrote and illustrated while making the Dinner Party. The manuscript has been updated with...
Issue 12: Cities
Welcome to Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature’s 12th edition. In this issue, we present work on the theme of ‘cities,’ whether in...