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Since the Auckland Transport Blog has been passed onto others, due to its conflicts of interest with my new job, I have felt at something of a loose end. I have actually been blogging, in one form or another, since January 2001, so discussing matters on the internet is something I very much enjoy.

At the same time, while casting around for ideas about what to do with my evenings, I have come across a pretty giant project that occupied a lot of my time in 2007, 2008 and 2009 – a massive fictional city that I drew. More on that in future posts.

So I wondered whether there is a way to put the two together, plus my ongoing general interest in urban matters which shouldn’t conflict with my work – which is very much transport related. The structure and development of cities is something that has interested me forever – and the fictional city this blog is based around has been in formulation, in one form or another, since the games I played with my sister when she was still a preschooler. Inevitably, those games seemed to require maps to make sense of them, over time the maps got more and more complex and the result is something that I think is pretty amazing.

But, I also realise that an entire blog dedicated to a fictional city that only really makes sense in my mind is going to be pretty boring reading. Understandably, people are interested in the real world. People are interested in the actual places they live, work and play. So, the real purpose of the blog will be – I hope – to illustrate through a fictional city how cities function, how they could function better, what makes cities so interesting, what goes wrong with cities and many many more things. Perhaps, hopefully in a similar way to how art helps us understand the world, taking our thinking outside the preconceptions of a particular place that actually exists might allow us to look more clearly at our urban world.

At the very least, hopefully it should be fun.

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