City As A Person

Everybody's sketch of a 'City As A Person'

Seeing a city as a person, at first it sounded intimidating a lot, but after starting out really it was really easy and fun to do. Basically we tried to create a character based on out findings from our research zones, the look of the city, the smell, the people around there and so on.

My illustration of Petaling Street as a person

So as the caption says, that's my illustration, but it's based on my classmate's point of view. She described it as a kind of messy old place with a lot of old people who are not very well dressed. Also there are a lot of smokes of cigarettes because of a lot of person smoking. And also the persons are a lot grumpy due to the stress that they face with a lot of clients.

So I came up with this sketch. A really thin man to represent to cheapness of the place and also he is not well dressed to show the messiness of the place. the man is also old and looks grumpy and he has a cigarette in his hand. Ah, also me and my classmate also named him Ah Cheong just for the fun of it and because we had time.

My classmate's illustration of Brickfields

So that's her illustration based on my point of view. The way i described Brickfields was really Indian fashioned style city with a lot of food and the people there are neither nice nor angry, they were just focused on their daily activities. Also the place was surrounded by huge modern buildings and there was a big contrast between these buildings and the little Indian shops but both were in the same city.

So she decided to make it an old woman to show that the people follow the old tradition and we made her fat to show that the place is full of restaurants. Also we made her wear the traditional Indian clothe which is a saree and she also has a lot of jewelries but at the same time the has a headphone on which is connected to an iphone to kind of represent the style of the area which is a mixture of both and the her facial expression is emotionless because of the moods of people around there. And oh we also put a name with her which is Yeshwaree, again just for the fun of it haha.

So then we put all of our drawings together and seperated the ones that were about the same place together. Based on that we made few observations and my conclusion is that most of the time when people try to interpret a city as a person, the person will most of the time resemble the people around there. We can also see similarities in the interpretation but it's illustrated in a different way but sometimes there are few differences based on the perspective that the other person interpret that same place. For example, I interpreted Bricksfields as a numb kind of person but other's interpreted it as a happy person, that contrast was in my opinion based on our perspective that we viewed things because I made Brickfields numb because i based myself on the people around the place but others I think they based themselves on the vibes of the surroundings as it had music playing mostly everywhere and it was a busy place with a lot of good things being sold everywhere.

So a City as a Person can really just be anything and it's all depends on the experience that you had there and the way you view things.