Talk:WikiCityGuides

GENERIC TOURIST GUIDES -- HOW TO FIND YOUR WAY THROUGH ANY (FILL IN THE BLANK) TOWN

It's been said that the Romans built their Legions' Camps on the exact same blueprint from England to Syria, so any Legionaire could walk into any camp in the empire and immediately know where everything was.

A variation on this idea. Most tour guides I've seen (not many, to be sure) talk about just one place at a time. After traveling on business in the USA, I started figuring out how to get where I needed with less and less preparation, since I was learning to read the local landscapes. It could be interesting, and helpful, to have "generic tourist guides" that help you learn how to get around certain kinds of cities, towns, neighborhoods, physical or cultural regions, etc.

Can you find your way around certain types of areas, even though you've never been to the particular neighborhood in front of you? Is this true because "once you've seen one (whatever), you've seen them all"? In this kind of traveler's guide, you could share that knowledge, even test your sophistication against others.

It wouldn't have to be famous areas. In fact, it may be more useful when the area is off the usual tourist tracks. Personally, I'm thinking of North American, small to medium sized Midwestern towns, and their combination of: 1. 'old town' (pre-World War 2, pre-suburban), this is surrounded by (3) below, while it surrounds (2)... 2. original downtown: at the intersection of THE two US highways in the county: here's the courthouse, lawyers offices, antique shops, maybe not much else)... it's the easiest spot in town to find. You drove in one on of the US highways, just keep going till you pass old town (see No. 1 above), then run into the OTHER US Highway. Ninety-plus per cent chance you're within two blocks of the County Courthouse. 3. postwar (WW2) suburban, 4. the "corporate strip" Built since the 1960's, along the Interstate Highway, or the new bypass route for the US Highway, (low, flat factories, new motels/ fast food/ big box retailers; actually your best bet for late-night necessities); if they have an airport, it's here; 5. the old highway strip. Where travelers stayed before the Interstate Highway was built around the edges of town back in the 1960's or 70's. Older, cheesy, courtyard motels... fast food outlets here are independent locals who are recycling the building after it was abandoned by its original nationwide franchise restauraunt. If the site is still occupied by the original restauraunt, it's probably a venerable local institution. 6. the old industrial strip (next to the old main railroad line, which is probably parallel to one of the US highways and possibly the river that runs next to the original downtown as well.

The point being, any given city in the US Midwest has all it's combination of these same neighborhoods. And they are related to one another. You could do a sociological analysis of how and why they relate to one another, and a little bit of that could help others interpret that landscape, but here the emphasis should be on your analysis' value for "blind orienteering."

A good generic travel guide, once internalized, would allow a totally foreign visitor to be dropped in from the other side of the planet, and find their way around town to where they want to go, even if they can't read the script of the signs on stores or streets, let alone read the language.

I'm sure someone can do the same for towns in every part of the world. Middle East? Central Europe? Mexico? Japan? How many of these descriptions would turn out to be essentially the same? If you grew up in the Australian Outback or the South African veld, would you be a stranger in the US Midwest? If you know Brooklyn, do you also know London's East End? I don't know, you tell me.

Of course, if some line of tour guides you know of already approximates this for some part of the world, just say so. And how closely they approach this standard. It would be helpful to be downright anthropological in tracing the extent to which a given type of neighborhood description travels. Exactly how far into Africa and Europe, as well as Asia, do you find "old cities" as built in the Middle East? You could almost call this a "cultural atlas of neighborhoods."